Love Bites Read online

  The swan slipped back into the water, and that’s when I saw the prints near her resting place. Two small handprints, like those a child might make in clay for a Mother’s Day gift, embedded so deeply into the dirt that it seemed as though someone had taken all his weight on his hands and not his feet. Tiny hands, though. In fact, there were no footprints at all, although it looked as if a big dog had been there recently. Just two palm prints and a fingernail. I wondered if they belonged together.

  It was the bartender who had called 911. I walked to the front of the hotel and came in through the lobby. They’d remodeled since the last time I’d been here—the weekend Jenny and I had gotten married and her parents had stayed in one of the rooms. Now there was a bar in the lobby, off to the left, next to a white leather banquette. The banquette curved around most of a freestanding brass fire pit, complete with artificial flames. There was a pool table on the other side and a white-flocked Christmas tree in front of a wall mirror with a full-size plastic marlin hanging on it. I liked the old décor better.

  The bartender was a woman.

  “I take it you’re not Robbie,” I said, showing her my badge. “Did he go off work?”

  “Nuh-uh. He’s working in the Muddy Moose. What’s going on? Everybody’s got a different story.” She was mid-twenties, tall, with short black hair that looked like she’d styled it in a Mixmaster. She probably paid somebody to cut it that way. Ah shit, I thought, I must be getting old. Her name tag said “Joc.”

  “That’s really your name? Jock?”

  “No, man. It’s Joc—like J-o-s. Short for Jocelyn.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry. What time did you start work, Joc?”

  “Right at seven.”

  “And have you been here ever since?”

  “Left around nine thirty to go to the john, but that’s just up those stairs. I wasn’t gone long. What should I have been looking for? There’s a dead body out there, right?”

  “Yep. That’s right. Young woman, long black hair. Blue T-shirt, black pants, blue high heels. Maybe a working girl?”

  “She didn’t come to the bar. Not this one, at least. You know where the Muddy Moose is? On the other side of the pond?”

  The Muddy Moose was the sports bar attached to the restaurant on the west side of the property. I found Robbie working behind the bar, his back to a wall full of windows opening on the crime scene. From this angle, the body was hidden. The Coroner Investigator had arrived. I could barely make him out through the window, kneeling by the waterfall.

  The Muddy Moose kept up the sportsmen’s lodge theme. Dark wood walls, low timber beam ceilings, and rusted iron chandeliers. The bar was tumbled stone boulders with a wood and stone surface. I expected animal heads on the walls. I got vinyl football pennants instead. For sportsmen of all kinds, I guess.

  Robbie had a name tag, too. Partially covered in what looked like dried vomit. It was hard to tell in the low lighting, but I thought he seemed a little green. He had two customers at the bar, both drinking beer. An empty shot glass sat behind him by the register. I introduced myself and asked for a ginger ale.

  “You found the body?” I asked while he was pouring. He put down the ginger ale and poured an inch of Johnnie Walker into the shot glass. Downed it before he spoke.

  “Nah. I was in here, working. One of the guests came running in, telling me to call 911. Fuckin’ thing, I had to wait almost three minutes before I talked to a real person. You know how long that is when you’ve got an emergency? Fuckin’ politicians, spending our tax money on everything but what we need. The teachers aren’t getting paid, they’re bailing out AIG, but cops are getting laid off. What if that girl had still been alive? When were you guys gonna get here to help her if nobody even answers the fuckin’ phone?”

  “I know. It’s a nightmare. Who was the guest, Robbie? Did you get his name?”

  “Ah, hell, sure. He’s a regular. Lives back east, stays here all the time when he’s in town. He’s an actor. Tom Atkins. Likes Rolling Rock beer. Or sometimes Sam Adams.”

  “He’s the one who found the body?”

  “Yeah. He waited while I called 911, and then we both went back to the pond. I couldn’t help it, man, I lost it. That girl looked like she’d been eaten alive.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  In my four-hundred-plus years as a vampyre, I’ve never understood why women scream when they see a mouse. They don’t scream when they see a mole, or a gopher, or a hedgehog, or anything else that comes out of a hole. Why a mouse?

  It was Wednesday morning early, and I was in my office on Beverly Drive. Sveta and Ilona, my two receptionists, were both screaming in that high-pitched tone they only use when they’ve seen a rodent. In Beverly Hills, we see a lot of them. I ran down the stairs to the lobby to find Ilona standing on her chair and Sveta scrunched into a corner with a staple gun in her hand, aiming it at the mouse as if it could fire lethal silver slivers or something.

  As soon as I reached the floor, the damn thing ran past me and back up the stairs. It wasn’t a mouse at all; it was a rat. A nice big fat rat that was waiting for me on the sofa in my office.

  I don’t have a problem with rats. I’ve worked with them in a couple of my films. They don’t seem to sense I’m not human, the way some species do. The only real problem with them in terms of making movies is that they can’t be trained to do anything. When I did The Rat Movie, we had to wipe me down with fish heads to keep them swarming over my body. As long as they thought I was something to eat, they’d stay in the shot.

  So I stared at this rat and he stared at me, and the next minute, he was standing on his back paws with his stomach distending. His snout shortened, his tail disappeared, and suddenly Orson Welles plopped down on my sofa, covering his considerable nude girth with my cashmere throw.

  “Ovsanna, darling,” he said in those same stentorian tones he’d used to sell Paul Masson, “do you think your business partner, the dear deceased Thomas, might have something in his office closet I could wear temporarily? I seem to remember he had great taste in clothes.”

  I buzzed Maral and asked her to bring Thomas’s robe from his bathroom. He always wore it if he had a masseur come to the office after work. Then I locked the door and waited for her knock. She knew Orson was one of my clan, one of the Vampyres of Hollywood, but she didn’t need to see him en dishabille.

  “What the hell are you doing here, Orson?” I asked. “And why did you come in as a rat?”

  “It was easier than passing myself off as one of those Orson Welles impersonators you can hire by the hour. My God, have you seen that fellow in front of Grauman’s Chinese? I was never that huge, even when I was huge! All those people making a living off my visage, it’s absolutely annoying.” He rearranged the throw so it reached his chest.

  “Well, you do look good. Living in seclusion must agree with you.”

  “On the contrary, Ovsanna, that’s exactly what I want to talk to you about. I’m bored with hiding; bored with reading biographies about myself written in the past tense. Killing Lilith’s dhampirs and weres was more fun than I’ve had since the Dean Martin roast. I want to come back to the world. Specifically, I want to come back to the business; it’s time I was creative again.”

  “And what do you want to do? Act again? Direct? Orson, you’re too recognizable; how will you explain your appearance?”

  “I won’t have to if I take over Thomas’s job as your head of development. Thomas rarely left the office except to get his ashes hauled at those S and M clubs he loved so much. I’ve thought it all out. I can start out doing everything on the phone, and then you can introduce me as outside talent you found through a headhunter or something. There isn’t an agent in town who’s old enough to remember what I sound like, and after all, I’m an actor, my dear. I can create an illusion. I’ll lose a little more weight and shave my head. I’d get plugs, but I wouldn’t be able to explain why my scalp was healing before they’d even inserted the roots.”

  Maral kn
ocked on the door. I opened it just enough to take the robe, but when I turned around, Orson had shifted back to his rat form. His tiny little eyes were peeking out from under the afghan. I blocked Maral’s view.

  “Peter King is on the phone, Ovsanna,” Maral said. If her voice had been any colder, I would have needed the afghan myself. “He wants you to meet him at the Coroner’s office. Now, if you can.”

  “The Coroner’s office? Can I? Do I have anything scheduled this morning?”

  She shook her head.

  “Well, find out where it is and tell him we’ll be there as soon as we can. And tell the girls downstairs not to worry about the rat, I’m getting rid of it.”

  I closed the door and turned back to Orson. He still had his tail and his snout, and he was perched on the arm of the sofa. “Honest to God, Orson, I don’t know what to do with you. I hadn’t even thought about who I want to replace Thomas.”

  The rat made little biting noises with his teeth. The look he gave me could only be described as cunning.

  “Let me sleep on it and let’s talk tomorrow,” I said. “And for God’s sake, if you’re going to shift again, bring a suit with you.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  I’d never been to the Coroner’s office. Vampyres don’t have a lot of relatives who end up dead. And I didn’t understand why Peter wanted me there to begin with. He’d told Maral he wanted me to look at a body; I thought bodies went to the morgue.

  Maral drove us down the 5, past Chavez Ravine, and onto North Mission in Boyle Heights. We’d barely spoken since I’d bled her, save for my asking her for Thomas’s robe and her telling me Peter wanted to see me. I noticed she’d removed my ring from her finger. It was a serpent carved in coral, something I’d had since Victoria was queen. Not only was she not talking to me, she’d stopped wearing the gift I’d given her. Her childish way of letting me know she was pissed.

  She looked haggard. She’d gone out last night after I left her bed, probably thinking if she were quiet enough, I wouldn’t know. You’d think after all these years she’d remember I can hear everything. I heard the click of the space bar on her computer—she must have been scrolling down Web sites—and then her bare feet on the stairs when she tiptoed outside to smoke a joint. I hate it when she smokes; she gets paranoid and crazy. Especially this new weed she gets from one of the actors in the kids’ movie we just wrapped. Leave it to a seventeen-year-old Disney star to have high-quality cannabis. He probably laces it with something. She thinks if she goes far enough onto the property, I won’t smell it. Not only can I smell it, I can hear her striking a match all the way across the yard. Plus, I taste the THC curdling her blood for days afterwards.

  After she got stoned, I heard her come in to get her shoes, and then she left again. At least she took Peter’s warning seriously—his business card was missing from the table. She must have taken it with her. I should have stopped her from driving, but I knew she needed to put some space between us. I figured she was going to stay at the beach house, and at that hour, with so little traffic, she’d be okay.

  Instead, she was home a couple of hours later. She must have really been loaded because she started making tea in the kitchen—some god-awful herbal concoction, from the smell of it—and then she locked herself in her bathroom at four in the morning and took a shower. She was talking to herself. It sounded like she was praying. I stopped listening when I realized that’s what it was.

  My dear, sweet Maral. She’s got her own demons to contend with. And some of them I can’t help her with.

  The view of the downtown skyline from the freeway was spectacular. The street we ended up on wasn’t. It looked like an aging industrial park, bounded by a hospital maintenance building, a parking lot, a reproductive biology lab, and the L.A. County College of Nursing and Allied Health. There were also a thrift shop, a flower shop, and a Jack in the Box. Maral parked at a broken meter in front of a tortilla stand. Instead of flashing “fail,” the meter flashed “dead.” Somebody in the Department of Transportation had a sense of humor.

  The Coroner’s building was a turn-of-the-century architectural gem in the midst of all that grayness. Red and taupe brick with a lot of neoclassical stonework and beautiful black cast-iron streetlamps. The floor tiles in front of the huge glass doors spelled out “Los Angeles General Hospital.” They looked original. Peter was standing on them, waiting for us. He was wearing the same clothes he’d had on last night, and when I saw the fatigue on his face, I realized he hadn’t been to bed yet.

  “Thanks for coming. This is the homicide I went out on last night. Body was found at the Sportsmen’s Lodge. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear it was the Cinema Slayer again. I want you to look at it. I know you get images sometimes when you touch things. I can’t believe I’m even asking you this, but I’d like to know what I’m dealing with here. I need all the help I can get.”

  Inside the lobby, Peter stopped at a glass cubicle and told the receptionist he was there to see Investigator Shin. Maral sat down to wait on a wooden bench across the room, and I drifted over to an opaque glass door labeled “Gift Shop.” The sign said they opened at eleven, but I tried the handle and it was unlocked. I couldn’t resist. What kinds of gifts could they be selling in the Coroner’s office?

  Beach towels and welcome mats. With a chalk outline of a dead body on them. And mouse pads reading, “We’re dying for your business.”

  The woman behind the counter said, “Welcome to Skeletons in the Closet.” Only in L.A., I thought. The whole place was filled with merchandise aimed at those “of dubious distinctive taste.” That’s what it said on the catalog: body bags for traveling, “Undertaker” boxer shorts, Department of Coroner lunch boxes, a kitchen cutting board with the dead body outline and the line “We have our work cut out for us” on it. They even had golf balls and club covers with dead bodies on them. My favorite was a hoodie with the drawing of a foot with a toe tag; it reminded me of my Dakhanavar ancestors, who liked to suck feet.

  Peter joined me as I was browsing through the Cutting Edge office supplies. Looking past him into the lobby, I saw an elderly woman and her family come out from a side room. They were all crying. The woman fainted into the arms of one of the men, and an attendant rushed over to help.

  “What is this place, Peter?” I asked.

  “Well, it started out as an adobe infirmary in the late 1800s. It’s the last of the four original brick buildings that made up Los Angeles General Hospital, and now it’s the administration building for County. And the Coroner’s office.”

  “I thought they kept dead bodies in the morgue.”

  “They do, if they’ve died of natural causes and if they’re identified. Jane and John Does and homicide cases come here. Welcome to the crypt.”

  We walked back into the lobby.

  An attractive Asian woman came down the stairs. Peter introduced her as a Coroner Investigator and thanked her for helping him out.

  “Only for you, Detective King. I’m breaking all kinds of protocol, letting you take someone in there with you. If I didn’t owe you big-time, this would never happen,” she said under her breath. “Don’t let me down.” She opened a door and motioned the three of us inside. Peter knew where he was going; she left us to get there on our own.

  We walked through a hallway with a large scale set into the floor. An attendant was weighing a body on a gurney. A young girl with a string of bullet holes across her chest. My first thought was that she’d been caught in a drive-by. What a tragedy. At least when my kind kill, we choose our victims deliberately.

  I damped down my sense of smell. I was aroused enough just being around Peter; the last thing I needed was the smell of blood. It didn’t matter whose. Even old, dried blood—still an aphrodisiac.

  Maral never said a word. I don’t think she saw the little girl. She stared straight ahead until we reached our destination and then stopped behind me, standing just inside the door.

  It was a long, refrigerated room, wi
th metal trays extending out from the left wall, stacked four high with a three-foot space between them, thirty in a row. Filled with dead bodies. Some were covered loosely in sheets, others were wrapped in clear plastic and tied with rope. I was amazed that there could be that many unidentified bodies or homicide victims dead at the same time. I guess with upwards of five hundred gangs in the city of L.A. alone, I shouldn’t have been surprised. I wondered if any of my kind were responsible for any of the deaths.

  Peter rolled a metal lift over to the sixth row, cranked a handle to bring it level with a tray holding a sheeted body, and pulled the tray out to the middle of the room. He uncovered the body.

  I understood immediately why he’d asked me to come. This body had been shredded. Eviscerated. If a human did this, he’d have had to use some kind of serrated knife or cutting tool. It could very well have been done by an animal. Or a beast.

  I reached out and touched the woman’s forehead, the only part of her face still intact. Sensations flooded my body . . . a drug high, and then terror. And then I couldn’t breathe. I was in water. Drowning. Something had sliced into my stomach and was holding me down. Churning the water around me. The water was so bloodied that I couldn’t see through it. Something had me by my body and was turning me, rolling me over and over, and making a loud, ratcheting sound—like a mechanical growl. A lion’s snarl in a tin bucket or an idling motorboat engine or something. I couldn’t place it. I pulled my hand away from the woman’s forehead and took a couple of deep breaths to center myself. This woman’s last moments had been horrific.

  “I think you’re going to find she drowned, Peter. Whatever tore her apart pulled her down in the water first, the way alligators do. She wasn’t alive when she got shredded. But he must have attacked her from behind because I don’t think she saw him before she drowned. At least, I didn’t see any other images.”