Page 28 of The Accidental Detectives

Wanda grabbed my arm, giving it a squeeze as she rested her head on my shoulder. “You okay?”

“What makes you think I’m not okay?”

She rubbed my arm. “I’ve known you for a long time, vampire. I know when you’re in your head. Talk to me?”

As the huge snowflakes drifted to the ground, I knew there was no hiding how I was feeling from Wanda. She had an emotional barometer unmatched by many.

“I can’t get those kids out of my head. They’re so young, and it’s fucking Christmastime, Wanda. Astrid’s such a frickin’ mess, who knows if she’s even gotten anything for them. It’s a shitty time. They need to have something to look forward to. They need some kind of stability. I don’t get the feeling Astrid’s got her shit together enough to keepthemtogether, ya know?”

Wanda nodded, her eyes sad when I saw them in her reflection in the window. “She did say her parents were coming from Arizona. I’m sure they’ll help her get situated.”

I nodded. “I hope so. What would make me feel better is finding out who killed Owen. I’m fucking tired of running into roadblocks, but where do we go from here?”

“I think we go talk to his ex-business partner Derek, and maybe we go back to the apartments and see if we can find anyone else besides Sonja the Neighborhood Spy to talk to us.”

“I’ll even put on another skirt if it means we can figure out who did this.”

Wanda stood on tiptoe and kissed my cheek. “I don’t care how much we tease you, and you might no longer have a beating heart, but you’re soft and gooey on the inside, and I love you because you’re so real—every day, all day.”

“I love you, too,” I whispered. I gave her a hard hug, and then I set her from me. “Now knock it the fuck off and help me find out who killed Owen.”

“Hey, you, two!” Marty poked her head into the sitting room of the murder basement with a goofy smile. “Guess who made the morning news? Come look.”

I scoffed as Wanda peered around my shoulder. “Brenda again? What’s she wanted for now, grand larceny? Did she snatch the ‘Mona Lisa’ right out from under the cops’ noses?”

I think some of my anger comes from the fact that the police hadn’t looked at anyone else since the beginning, and now that they’d found the cord from Owen’s lamp in her house, she was screwed if they got their hands on her.

Marty shook her head, the messy bun on top of her head bobbing. “It’s not quite that bad. Not for Brenda anyway, but according to the news this morning, we’ve gone viral.” She held up her phone and pressed play.

We watched a grainy video of three black blurs, zipping down a street lit up with Christmas lights.

My eyes went wide. “Is…is thatus?”

Marty nodded with a mischievous smile. “The news is reporting it as some strange, unexplainable lighting phenomenon, but the best part? There are some hardcore conspiracy theories going around that these are images of—are you ready?Aliens!” She began to howl with laughter, tears streaming down her face.

I looked at the number of views it had and it was already up to five hundred thousand. But some of the comments?

To my very untrained eyes, those look exactly like the aliens that abducted me from sleepaway camp when I was nine…

Do you see the outline by this shadow’s head? If you look closely, it almost resembles a butterfly.

“Fucking butterflies!” I began to howl with laughter, too.

And that felt good in the middle of us all feeling like so much shit.

Chapter

Nine

Got a brick wall we can run into? Because I think we’ve run out of ’em here…

On our way back to the apartments where Owen lived, to see if we could drum up someone—anyone—who had some information the police might have missed, Marty insisted we touch base with what we had so far.

Which was kind of like a pile of hot, steaming shit, but I indulged them anyway.

“So let’s go over everything we have to date,” Marty encouraged.

I groaned from the backseat. It had only been two days, but it felt like two years. Or was it three? I’d lost track. “How the fuck can we do that without your whiteboard and sticky notes?”

---