The air grew hazy around the collie, seemed to hum and vibrate with energy, and then the form began to change within that electric concentration. When the haze cleared, there was Sam kneeling on the floor, buck-naked. Wow, what a bottom. I had to make myself close my eyes, tell myself repeatedly that I had not been unfaithful to Bill. Bill’s butt, I told myself staunchly, was every bit as neat.
“I’m ready,” Sam’s voice said, so close behind me that I jumped. I stood up quickly and turned to face him, and found his face about six inches from mine.
“Sookie,” he said hopefully, his hand landing on my shoulder, rubbing and caressing it.
I was angry because half of me wanted to respond.
“Listen here, buddy, you could have told me about yourself any time in the past few years. We’ve known each other what, four years? Or even more! And yet, Sam, despite the fact that I see you almost daily, you wait until Bill is interested in me, before you even . . .” and unable to think how to finish, I threw my hands up in the air.
Sam drew back, which was a good thing.
“I didn’t see what was in front of me until I thought it might be taken away,” he said, his voice quiet.
I had nothing to say to that. “Time to go home,” I told him. “And we better get you there without anyone seeing you. I mean it.”
This was chancy enough without some mischievous person like Rene seeing Sam in my car in the early morning and drawing wrong conclusions. And passing them on to Bill.
So off we went, Sam hunched down in the backseat. I pulled cautiously behind Merlotte’s. There was a truck there; black, with pink and aqua flames down the sides. Jason’s.
“Uh-oh,” I said.
“What?” Sam’s voice was somewhat muffled by his position.
“Let me go look,” I said, beginning to be anxious. Why would Jason park over here in the employees’ parking area? And it seemed to me there was a shape in the truck.
I opened my door. I waited for the sound to alert the figure in the truck. I watched for evidence of movement. When nothing happened, I began to walk across the gravel, as frightened as I’d ever been in the light of day.
When I got closer to the window, I could see that the figure inside was Jason. He was slumped behind the wheel. I could see that his shirt was stained, that his chin was resting on his chest, that his hands were limp on the seat on either side of him, that the mark on his handsome face was a long red scratch. I could see a videotape resting on the truck dashboard, unlabelled.
“Sam,” I said, hating the fear in my voice. “Please come here.”
Quicker than I could believe, Sam was beside me, then reaching past me to unlatch the truck door. Since the truck had apparently been sitting there for several hours—there was dew on its hood—with the windows closed, in the early summer, the smell that rolled out was pretty strong and compounded of at least three elements: blood, sex, and liquor.
“Call the ambulance!” I said urgently as Sam reached in to feel for Jason’s pulse. Sam looked at me doubtfully. “Are you sure you want to do that?” he asked.
“Of course! He’s unconscious!”
“Wait, Sookie. Think about this.”
And I might have reconsidered in just a minute, but at that moment Arlene pulled up in her beat-up blue Ford, and Sam sighed and went into his trailer to phone.
I was so naive. That’s what comes of being a law-abiding citizen for nearly every day of my life.
I rode with Jason to the tiny local hospital, oblivious to the police looking very carefully at Jason’s truck, blind to the squad car following the ambulance, totally trusting when the emergency room doctor sent me home, telling me he’d call me when Jason regained consciousness. The doctor told me, eyeing me curiously, that Jason was apparently sleeping off the effects of alcohol or drugs. But Jason had never drunk that much before, and Jason didn’t use drugs: our cousin Hadley’s descent into the life of the streets had made a profound impression on both of us. I told the doctor all that, and he listened, and he shooed me off.
Not knowing what to think, I went home to find that Andy Bellefleur had been roused by his pager. He’d left me a note telling me that, and nothing else. Later on, I found that he’d actually been in the hospital while I was there, and waited until I was gone out of consideration for me before he’d handcuffed Jason to the bed.
Chapter 12
S
AM CAME TO give me the news about eleven o’clock.
“They’re going to arrest Jason as soon as he comes to, Sookie, which looks like being soon.” Sam didn’t tell me how he came to know this, and I didn’t ask.
I stared at him, tears running down my face. Any other day, I might have thought of how plain I look when I cry, but today was not a day I cared about my outsides. I was all in a knot, frightened for Jason, sad about Amy Burley, full of anger the police were making such a stupid mistake, and underneath it all, missing my Bill.
“They think it looks like Amy Burley put up a fight. They think he got drunk after he killed her.”
“Thanks, Sam, for warning me.” My voice came from way faraway. “You better go to work, now.”
After Sam had seen that I needed to be alone, I called information and got the number of Blood in the Quarter. I punched in the numbers, feeling somehow I was doing a bad thing, but I couldn’t think how or why.
“Bloooooood . . . in the Quarter,” announced a deep voice dramatically. “Your coffin away from home.”
Geez. “Good morning. This is Sookie Stackhouse calling from Bon Temps,” I said politely. “I need to leave a message for Bill Compton. He’s a guest there.”
“Fang or human?”
“Ah . . . fang.”
“Just one minute, please.”
The deep voice came back on the line after a moment. “What is the message, madam?”
That gave me pause.
“Please tell Mr. Compton that . . . my brother has been arrested, and I would appreciate it if he could come home as soon as his business is completed.”
“I have that down.” The sound of scribbling. “And your name again?”
“Stackhouse. Sookie Stackhouse.”
“All right, miss. I’ll see to it that he gets your message.”
“Thanks.”
And that was the only action I could think of to take, until I realized it would be much more practical to call Sid Matt Lancaster. He did his best to sound appalled to hear Jason was going to be arrested, said he’d hurry over to the hospital as soon as he got out of court that afternoon, and that he’d report back to me.
I drove back to the hospital to see if they’d let me sit with Jason until he became conscious. They wouldn’t. I wondered if he was already conscious, and they weren’t telling me. I saw Andy Bellefleur at the other end of the hall, and he turned and walked the other way.
Damn coward.
I went home because I couldn’t think of anything to do. I realized it wasn’t a workday for me anyway, and that was a good thing, though I didn’t really care too much at that point. It occurred to me that I wasn’t handling this as well as I ought, that I had been much steadier when Gran had died.
But that had been a finite situation. We would bury Gran, her killer would be arrested, we would go on. If the police seriously believed that Jason had killed Gran in addition to the other women, then the world was such a bad and chancy place that I wanted no part of it.
But I realized, as I sat and looked in front of me that long, long afternoon, that it was naivete like that that had led to Jason’s arrest. If I’d just gotten him into Sam’s trailer and cleaned him up, hidden the film until I found out what it contained, above all not called the ambulance . . . that had been what Sam had been thinking when he’d looked at me so doubtfully. However, Arlene’s arrival had kind of wiped out my options.
I thought the phone would start ringing as soon as people heard.
But no one called.
They didn’t know what to say.
Sid Matt Lancaster came about four-thirty.
Without any preliminary, he told me, “They’ve arrested him. For first-degree murder.”
I closed my eyes. When I opened them, Sid was regarding me with a shrewd expression on his mild face. His conservative black-framed glasses magnified his muddy brown eyes, and his jowls and sharp nose made him look a little like a bloodhound.
“What does he say?” I asked.
“He says that he was with Amy last night.”
I sighed.
“He says they went to bed together, that he had been with Amy before. He says he hadn’t seen Amy in a long time, that the last time they were together Amy was acting jealous about the other women he was seeing, really angry. So he was surprised when she approached him last night in Good Times. Jason says Amy acted funny all night, like she had an agenda he didn’t know about. He remembers having sex with her, he remembers them lying in bed having a drink afterward, then he remembers nothing until he woke up in the hospital.”
“He was set up,” I said firmly, thinking I sounded exactly like a bad made-for-TV movie.
“Of course.” Sid Matt’s eyes were as steady and assured as if he’d been at Amy Burley’s place last night.
Hell, maybe he had.
“Listen, Sid Matt.” I leaned forward and made him meet my eyes. “Even if I could somehow believe that Jason had killed Amy, and Dawn, and Maudette, I could never believe he would raise his finger to hurt my grandmother.”
“All right, then.” Sid Matt prepared to meet my thoughts, fair and square, his entire body proclaimed it. “Miss Sookie, let’s just assume for a minute that Jason did have some kind of involvement in those deaths. Perhaps, the police might think, your friend Bill Compton killed your grandmother since she was keeping you two apart.”
I tried to give the appearance of considering this piece of idiocy. “Well, Sid Matt, my grandmother liked Bill, and she was pleased I was seeing him.”
Until he put his game face back on, I saw stark disbelief in the lawyer’s eyes. He wouldn’t be at all happy if his daughter was seeing a vampire. He couldn’t imagine a responsible parent being anything but appalled. And he couldn’t imagine trying to convince a jury that my grandmother had been pleased I was dating a guy who wasn’t even alive, and furthermore was over a hundred years older than me.
Those were Sid Matt’s thoughts.
“Have you met Bill?” I asked.
He was taken aback. “No,” he admitted. “You know, Miss Sookie, I’m not for this vampire stuff. I think it’s taking a chink out of a wall we should keep built up, a wall between us and the so-called virus-infected. I think God intended that wall to be there, and I for one will hold up my section.”
“The problem with that, Sid Matt, is that I personally was created straddling that wall.” After a lifetime of keeping my mouth shut about my “gift,” I found that if it would help Jason, I’d shake it in anybody’s face.
“Well,” Sid Matt said bravely, pushing his glasses up on the bridge of his sharp nose, “I am sure the Good Lord gave you this problem I’ve heard about for a reason. You have to learn how to use it for his glory.”
No one had ever quite put it that way. That was an idea to chew over when I had time.
“I’ve made us stray from the subject, I’m afraid, and I know your time is valuable.” I gathered my thoughts. “I want Jason out on bail. There is nothing but circumstantial evidence tying him to Amy’s murder, am I right?”
“He’s admitted to being with the victim right before the murder, and the videotape, one of the cops hinted to me pretty strongly, shows your brother having sex with the victim. The time and date on the film indicate it was made in the hours before her death, if not minutes.”
Damn Jason’s peculiar bedroom preferences. “Jason doesn’t drink much at all. He smelled of liquor in the truck. I think it was just spilled over him. I think a test will prove that. Maybe Amy gave him some narcotic in the drink she fixed him.”
“Why would she do that?”
“Because, like so many women, she was mad at Jason because she wanted him so much. My brother is able to date almost anyone he wants. No, I’m using that euphemism.”
Sid Matt looked surprised I knew the word.
“He could go to bed with almost anyone he wanted. A dream life, most guys would think.” Weariness descended on me like fog. “Now there he sits in the jail.”
“You think another man did this to him? Framed him for this murder?”
“Yes, I do.” I leaned forward, trying to persuade this skeptical lawyer by the force of my own belief. “Someone envious of him. Someone who knows his schedule, who kills these women when Jason’s off work. Someone who knows Jason had had sex with these gals. Someone who knows he likes to make tapes.”
“Could be almost anyone,” Jason’s lawyer said practically.
“Yep,” I said sadly. “Even if Jason was nice enough to keep quiet about exactly who he’d been with, all anyone’d have to do is see who he left a bar with at closing time. Just being observant, maybe having asked about the tapes on a visit to his house . . .” My brother might be somewhat immoral, but I didn’t think he’d show those videos to anyone else. He might tell another man that he liked to make the videos, though. “So this man, whoever he is, made some kind of deal with Amy, knowing she was mad at Jason. Maybe he told her he was going to play a practical joke on Jason or something.”
“Your brother’s never been arrested before,” Sid Matt observed.
“No.” Though it had been a near thing, a couple of times, to hear Jason tell it.
“No record, upstanding member of the community, steady job. There may be a chance I can get him out on bail. But if he runs, you’ll lose everything.”
It truly had never occurred to me that Jason might skip bail. I didn’t know anything about arranging for bail, and I didn’t know what I’d have to do, but I wanted Jason out of that jail. Somehow, staying in jail until the legal processes had been gone through before the trial . . . somehow, that would make him look guiltier.