Page 43 of Smokescreen (Knight & Daywalker)
He turned and took a few steps toward the front like he was leaving, and when Miller hesitated to follow him to the door, he held his hand out toward the door in a gesture that screamed, “well?”
“We should take him downtown and?—”
“For what? Writing random lists of people? Yeah, good luck making that into a charge against him. No wonder you boys in vice are always failing to bring charges. Come on. I have an idea, and we’re following up.” He glanced back at me. “Don’t leave town, obviously, and be careful. I know you’re good at your job, but this isn’t lost pets or angry husbands, Flynn. This is murder. Cornered murderers? Tend to murder again.”
“Never left town before, not gonna start now,” I said, waving to both of them. I couldn’t speak to the rest, because he wasn’t wrong, but also, I wasn’t going to stop. How could I? The cops were never going to find the killer, and someone needed to.
When the two of them were across the parking lot climbing into a boring brown sedan, there was a sniff behind me, and I turned to find Twist sitting up and stretching on my desk. First her back legs, then front, then arching her back like one of those cats on a halloween card. “Who was that, and why did he smell like lunch?” she asked.
“It was just garlic,” I said, frowning. Wasn’t garlic bad for cats? If we’d been feeding her so much garlic that she equated the scent with food, that probably wasn’t a good thing. “And Detective Cain isn’t lunch. People aren’t for eating. He’s a good guy who’s trying to make Avalon a safer place for us to be.”
“No, no, not him,” she disagreed. “The other one. The shiny one with the red cheeks. The Cain is good. I like him. He made you feel better when you were sick.”
That was...maybe the sweetest thing anyone had ever said to me. She liked Cain because he’d comforted me after seeing Charles’s body.
Frankly, I had liked him before, but I could admit that I liked him more after. But that meant she’d thought Detective Miller smelled like food, not Cain and his Italian lunch lie.
I didn’t even remember what Miller had smelled like, other than the usual mix of human smells, sweat and food and maybe a hint of stale cigarette. He hadn’t smelled unusual to me, but maybe my nose wasn’t as good as Twist’s. I turned to Davin. “What did Miller smell like to you? The short balding one?”
He stared after them a moment, then turned back to look at me. “Lunch?”
“Like—” What the hell did that even mean? How did one human smell like lunch and another not? Especially since I’d watched Davin eat a whole lot of regular food, so I didn’t think he was one of those vampires who equated humans with eating.
He looked back at me, heavy consideration still on his face. “It’s...it’s hard, because I’m not sure what everything means. It’s just, something about him hits the instincts. Makes you want to hunt him and put him on the ground. It’s sharp. Astringent. I don’t know what it is.”
Huh. I considered all the information for a moment, and what I knew of humans smells. “Was it stronger after you glared him into compliance?”
“Much,” he agreed.
“Fear,” I concluded, because it was the only answer that made sense. I didn’t remember smelling anything like it, but my sense of smell was a little hit-and-miss sometimes. “You know how people say ‘they can smell your fear’ about wild animals? That’s what you’re smelling. Some chemical change that comes along with him being intimidated by you.”
Davin didn’t seem especially excited about that. No, he winced and glanced at the floor, like it was a little embarrassing. I got it, though. It sucked when your instincts tried to control you.
“Okay, so anyway, we’re not eating Detective Miller, even if I do think he’s a beady-eyed little weasel man. Instead, we’re going to talk about Broken Dreams at nine.”
Davin squinted at me a moment, then shook his head, like he was trying to get water out of his ears. “Say that again, but in a way that makes sense.”
“Broken Dreams,” I specified. “The note said Whisper, Broken Dreams, nine p.m. and the date was a few days ago. Nine p.m. and the date are self-explanatory. Whisper is a legend in the local vampiric community, and also in the local human community. An illegally made child of the city’s previous senator, a gang leader who caused incredible amounts of damage to both city infrastructure and the authorities’ reputation for being able to do something about problems. Everyone knows about it, and I pointed it out to Cain. That’s why he thanked me. Broken Dreams, though, that was a nightclub Charles owned and ran back in the nineties. It’s been closed for over two decades, so maybe the cops won’t find out about it.”
Davin’s eyes narrowed as he watched me. “Are you saying you just lied to the guards?”
“Cops,” I corrected. “And lied isn’t...quite the right term. I just didn’t tell them everything.”
“You said you didn’t know what Broken Dreams was. That was a lie.”
“I didn’t?—”
“You did.”
I had. It was true. Somehow, I still didn’t feel bad about it. “It’s reasonable that I wouldn’t have known about it, though,” I pointed out. “It closed when I was elementary-school aged. And if there’s any chance Whisper goes there or uses the former club for more than just a meeting that’s already over? I won’t apologize for not steering the cops toward it. I don’t think they should confront Whisper. They’d try to arrest them. How do you think that would go?”
And that, he didn’t have an answer for.
At least, not a happy one.
CHAPTER 18
Broken Dreams was awful.
