Onstage, a performer belted out a lip-synching extravaganza. A Celine Dion twin. Holy crap.
She was standing in the spotlight with a microphone, dressed in a colorful mess of scarves, singing one of many silly tunes Dawn hadn’t ever learned the name of. The audience yelled along during the “river deep, mountain high!” chorus, reminding Dawn of why she’d never bothered.
Unruffled, Breisi made her way to a bartender as Kiko laughed and took off his shades, then started snapping his fingers to the music.
Breisi was back in a flash. “Sasha’s in the dressing room!” she said, raising her voice over the music. “Rolf said to go right back!”
Rolf. As they weaved through the water-and sweat-misted crowd, Dawn glanced at the beefy, shirtless bartender dancing his way toward a new customer. They were lax on security here, which probably meant this bar had nothing to do with vamps.
On their way, Dawn rubbed against some decent chests, so she could’ve called it a good night right there. But her better instincts were still on alert for Underground clues because
that’s
what was going to lead to Frank.
In the dressing room, half-garbed drag queens primped in mirrors surrounded by big, white bulbs. The air was heavy with Aqua Net and the oily scent of makeup.
Kiko asked a Diana Ross look-alike where Sasha was, and the performer batted her lengthy false eyelashes and gave the psychic a sassy smile.
“There, sugar.” She pointed a few mirrors down. “Wow, aren’t you a darling thing? A sample-sized man, just like shampoo at a hotel.”
Kiko laughed good-naturedly. Then they all made their way over to Sasha’s station, where a robed performer was sitting in a chair, slipping off a long, dark wig.
It seemed such a personal act that Dawn actually averted her gaze. In that instant, the delayed images of what Sasha kept taped to the mirror infiltrated her: photos of recent ice skaters like Michelle Kwan, Sarah Hughes, and then his two obvious namesakes—Sasha Cohen and Irina Slutskaya. The combination of the last two monikers made for a perfect drag queen.
She heard Breisi greeting the performer. Then, the next thing Dawn knew, she was peeking up again, finding that Sasha had already stuck a baseball cap over his head and was making quick work out of removing his heavy makeup with fingers full of cold cream.
“Too bad,” he said in a deep voice. “You missed my Cher act.”
Now, Dawn had awesome gaydar; a girl needed it badly in Hollywood. The thing was, Sasha wasn’t setting it off.
Breisi took position next to the vanity, posture relaxed. “As much as we would have loved to see it, Sasha, we’re here to discover if you can help us.”
A finely tuned machine, the Limpet questioning method kicked into gear. Kiko stood on the other side of Sasha, getting ready to execute his touch-reading. Dawn hung back while Breisi consumed the subject’s attention this time around.
“Help with what?” Sasha raised his darkly penciled brows and paused while taking off his lipstick.
“Lee Tomlinson.” Kiko said it with command, seeing as he played “bad cop” to Breisi’s “good cop.”
Dawn, naturally, was the “ugly cop,” so she saved her energy in case it was needed.
The performer ran a gaze down Kiko’s body, then back up. It was a curious assessment, the recognition one social outsider might have for another.
He turned back to the mirror and finished cosmetic-removal duties. Impressive muscles lurked under his robe, and now that Dawn could see him better, she realized that his features were masculine and feminine at the same time. An ambiguously pretty boy who could end up starring in spy movies if he wanted to.
“Lee is as good as dead to me,” Sasha said.
“What do you mean, he is as ‘good as dead’?” Breisi asked.
“I mean he murdered a woman, they’ve got enough evidence to prove that. We were close for a while, but I don’t cozy up to killers so, basically, I haven’t talked to him since we broke up. That was before Klara Monaghan’s last days.”
Hearing him say Klara’s name when everyone else in town seemed to have forgotten it, Dawn caught his gaze in the mirror. He grinned slightly, as if giving himself credit.
He knew the name, but the death didn’t move him. Either this guy had no feelings or he knew how to hide them well.
Welcome to my club,
Dawn thought.
“We heard you and Lee were an item,” Kiko said bluntly.
Sasha turned an amused gaze on the psychic. “Yes, we were. Does it matter?”
“We’re attempting to get to know him through his close relationships.” Breisi fished out her PI license and flashed it. “And in just five minutes, you’ve been more forthcoming with us than his family and anyone else within a one-hundred-mile radius put together.”
“Why’re you investigating him?”
“Because there’s been a similar murder,” Breisi said. “We’re looking into any links between the two. Unfortunately, that’s all we can tell you due to client privacy restraints.”
“So you’re doing some good.” Sasha seemed fine with that explanation as he tossed away a foundation-smeared tissue.
“We’re trying,” Kiko said. “But the leads are slow.”
“Really. Then we’ll see if I can’t help. What do you want to know? I’m an open book. A regular exhibitionist, like anyone else around here.”
As if to prove his point, he rose, sliding off his robe in the same fluid movement. Dawn caught a glimpse of smooth skin and hard body before she inexplicably looked away again. She came to lock gazes with Kiko, who’d angled his glance away, too, wide-eyed. She wasn’t terribly surprised, him basically being a puritan and all. But her? Had this afternoon’s bout with The Voice made her think twice about…well, being too hard-bitten about sex?
When Breisi said something else, it sounded as if she was still facing their interviewee. What do you know?
“How long were you with Lee, Sasha?”
Dawn heard him moving around, probably putting on clothes. “A few months. Then we broke up, he tried to flee, and the authorities hauled him back for murder.”
“You had no contact with him during all this?”
“None. Before I knew about what he’d done with Klara Monaghan, I just assumed he’d taken up with another fling. Lee wasn’t a relationship kind of man, not with males or females.”
“He was bi?”
Sasha stopped moving, and Dawn looked up to find him fully clothed in jeans and an Eddie Bauer–like shirt.
“Lee didn’t label himself,” he said. “I don’t do much of that, either. This queen stuff? I have a lot of fun doing it, but it doesn’t make me something I’m not. Lee and I felt the same way—we are what we are. That’s what attracted us.”
“What did his mom think?” Dawn asked.
When Sasha turned his gaze on her, she felt a rogue shiver travel over her arms. Maybe what unsettled her was in his eyes, the intensity of the light green or gray or…some combination of color.
“I don’t know about his mom,” Sasha said, “but the sister I talked to didn’t like the idea of Lee being with another man.”
Dawn would put money on the notion that the sister—Marg or Cassie?—had told Mama Tomlinson about a lov-ah but hadn’t mentioned he was male. Could it be that revealing this tidbit would’ve put the Lee-adoring Coral over the edge and the siblings were avoiding that?
“I’m starting to think there was a lot Lee’s family didn’t know about him,” Dawn said, searching Sasha’s face for any sign of her double meaning.
Kiko jumped on the Underground reference, having turned back around to the conversation. He reached out to Sasha, touching his bare arm as if to get his attention. “Before you and Lee broke up, did you notice anything different about him? Was he secretive? Did he go places and refuse to talk about where he’d been or did you catch him in any lies?”
Underground bait.
“Yes, I did notice some things.” Sasha sent a deliberate glance to Kiko’s lingering hand, then grinned at the smaller man. “He’d get moody when I’d ask him what he did the night before. And we had arguments about marks on his body. Bites that I hadn’t given him.”
At Sasha’s cheeky expression, Kiko removed his hand, then loosely backed away, hands up, as if silently saying,
Hey, that wasn’t me making a pass. Not gay. Sooooo not gay. But I respect you for your choices, dude.
Dawn could’ve been wildly entertained by the Sasha/Kiko show, but she was trying to see if her coworker had gotten a reading. Also, she was wondering about that bite part.
“You were into biting, too?” she asked.
“Still am. Care to trade some?”
The feminine side of her preened.
Yeah, screw
you,
Eva. See how men can like me as much as they like you?
But her common sense was overriding everything else.
“Bites aren’t my thing,” Dawn said. “Where do you think Lee got his?”
As Sasha paused, Dawn noticed her partners trading a glance. From the way Breisi glowered, it was easy to guess that Kiko hadn’t gotten much off of his Sasha reading. Damn.
“Biting was just playtime for me.” Their interviewee rested his hands on his hips, coming off like the most masculine thing on the block. “But for Lee…? He got more and more into the fetish. Obviously, he went to other sources besides little ol’ me. I’m sure there’re a thousand places in town you can check into, businesses or pleasure palaces that would’ve accommodated him.”
Almost in desperation, Kiko watched Sasha’s hand, no doubt planning how to touch him again.
“But,” the ex-lover added, yanking his cap lower, “what do I care? Lee wasn’t the love of my life. Hell, when he hit the big time, like he always bragged about, I was going to leech off of his grand career anyway until it was time to move on. He took what he wanted from me, and I’ve done the same with him.”
Sasha tossed another charming grin to Dawn, making her wonder if he was full of shit or just the world’s most honest individual. Something told her he wasn’t kidding and wasn’t remotely ashamed of it.
Once again, his eyes burned into her. Automatically, she reverted to training, jamming him out with a mind block. But after a second, she realized she’d gone overboard.
God, she was on edge. All this waiting for something to attack them since Robby died was eating at her.
“Sasha—” she began.
“My real name’s Dave. Dave Nisro.”
He seemed to catch something over her shoulder, and his smile grew wider, revealing a set of beautiful white teeth as he spread out his arms and ambled away from his dressing station.
Dawn followed him, discovering a young man walking toward Sasha/Dave to be enveloped in his embrace. The other male was somewhat familiar to her: slender, pale, his long auburn hair teased out to…
Oh, crap. Sasha’s friend resembled Klara Monaghan.
Jaw tight, Breisi guided the team toward the back exit of the dressing room while Sasha nuzzled the new arrival. As the three of them passed, they thanked him, knowing they were anything but done.
“Give me a call if you need anything else,” he said, eyes still only on the Klara doppelganger.
Kiko was the last one headed for the door. “Count on it.”
The exit led to a back alley, where a Dumpster provided stale-trash cologne and a lone streetlight shone piss yellow.
Weirded out, Dawn stuck her hand in a pocket, fingers digging past some velvet to touch the reassuring, sharp tips of her silver, holy-water-tipped throwing stars:
shuriken
.
“That was disturbing,” Breisi said.
“Which part?” Kiko wrinkled his nose at the Dumpster. “Where the male Klara clone sauntered in or where Sasha kept crossing gender lines to hit on Dawn? It was all…”
“Something to go on.” Dawn couldn’t hold back a smile because it was a lead, a reason to think Sasha was more invested in Klara or Lee than was obvious. “And I keep wondering—is Sasha vampire material or just a leech?”
“Guys, we gotta come back,” Kiko said, hopped up. “I had a reading from him—mainly images of Lee, and I don’t want to linger on those, thank you—but nothing about the Underground. I can get more, I know I can!”
Breisi motioned toward the alley’s mouth and they all moved toward it. “Maybe he isn’t vampire-related at all, Kik.”
“Maybe he is and I need to dig deeper.” His voice cracked on the last word as they passed the Dumpster.
Dawn felt terrible for him. “Hey, Kiko, don’t…”
A shudder ripped through her, a warning that flinted against all the time she’d spent thinking that a vamp attack was just waiting around the corner for them—
She turned to find red eyes staring back at her, a dark shape huddled beside the Dumpster. Without pause, she extracted a throwing star, fired it at the looming threat.
“Dawn!” Breisi yelled.
But it was too late—she was already buzzing, glad to get back into action, to finally do something that would bring her that much closer to Frank.
The dark shape yelped, jumped away, red eyes dropping to the ground. Dawn’s pulse imploded as she used this distraction to reach for her revolver.
But before she could fire, Breisi was yelling at her to stop again.
Vision blurred by memory, by the running red blood of Eva’s crime-scene photos and Robby’s mind rape, Dawn barely held back. Then…
No. God, no.
Her eyes focused to reveal a bare-armed homeless woman with blood on her arm from where the blade had glanced off. She was quaking in her ragged clothes—not shrinking in Nosferatu, blood-poisoned injury. She was pinned in terror like a moth that only wanted escape—not clawing at Dawn with gnarled fingers.
As Dawn’s stomach turned, the woman’s rickety-toothed mouth gaped in a scream, her brown eyes holding nothing but horror.
Horror at seeing Dawn, who had suddenly, easily turned back into the hunter who’d savagely beheaded a little-boy vampire.
On the ground, a stuffed animal tilted on its side, toy eyes glowing red. Bile crept up the back of Dawn’s throat.
“It’s one of them!” Kiko yelled.
When Dawn turned around, she found Breisi restraining the small man from joining in with his usual monster-hunting verve.
“No, it’s…” She choked on disgust. “It’s
not
.”
She faced the homeless woman again, recoiling at her terrified gape while putting her revolver back in its holster. “She’s human.”