He looked thoughtful, and grave, and they sat in silence for a moment before he shook his head. “I can’t speak to that,” he said.
“But I can tell you that from the moment the Daylight Foundation arrived in Morganville, they had a plan, and they did nothing but help those in need. You say they’re willing to kill, but they didn’t even kill the vampires— in fact, Mr. Fallon went out of his way to ensure that they were treated well. Maybe you’ve seen bad things they’ve done, but I’ve seen things too— good things. I can walk down these streets in peace. That has to count for something.”
“It does,” she admitted. “But there are a few hundred vampires trapped in that mall on the edge of town, and they can’t stay there forever. What do you think the Daylighters intend to do with them long term?”
“Fallon says he’s going to make sure they’re safe, and I believe him,” Simonds said. “Look, I worked with some vampires, and they were good people— okay, blood drinkers, but they never hurt anybody. In fact, the ones I worked with sometimes put their lives on the line to save regular people. I know vampires aren’t just monsters; they can be good or bad, just like us. But fact is, they’re not natural, and a good percentage of them don’t have any kind of conscience. You can’t argue with that.”
She couldn’t. She knew a lot of the vamps were dangerous; some were outright awful and needed to be locked up forever.
Some were self- interested to a sociopathic degree, and many of them wouldn’t see much wrong with killing someone who was in their way. Vampires didn’t become vampires by being squeamish . . .
or selfless.
But that didn’t mean they deserved death. And she suspected— no, really, she knew— that ultimately that was the answer Fallon had. Death. Ridding the world of vampires forever— and everything supernatural, like the Founder Houses. Like Miranda.
“You want some more coffee?” Claire asked. He’d drained his cup quickly. Simonds nodded, his expression still and unreadable.
He had a nice face, long and thin, with a particularly nice dark chocolate skin tone and warm brown eyes, and under other cir- cumstances he might have been a friend.
But not now.
She filled his mug again, and realized that she’d been avoiding looking at the kitchen pantry. That was probably the kind of give- away he was watching for, she thought, so she put the coffeepot back on the burner, walked to the pantry, opened it, and got out another bag of coffee beans. She put it up in the cabinet above the coffeemaker.
“How old is this house?” he asked her. She could hear rum- maging upstairs now— Kentworth, going through her bedroom.
Claire felt an angry flush in her cheeks, and sat down hard in her chair to clutch her coffee mug. She didn’t like the idea of someone pawing through her things, meager as they might be. And ridiculously, she hated the idea of him seeing the still- messy bed where she and Shane had spent the night. That felt really intrusive and creepy. “This is one of the Founder Houses, right?”
“One of the original thirteen,” she said. “I think only a few of them are still left now.”
“Beautiful place,” he said. “All original construction?”
She immediately felt as if a trap was looming, and covered her pause with a sip of coffee. “No idea,” she said with a smile. “I haven’t been here that long, you know.” She knew that people tended to underestimate her— she was small, and young, and could look very innocent when she wanted to . . . and Simonds didn’t know her very well.
But she could tell that he wasn’t buying it, and as he opened his mouth to ask her something else, probably something a lot more intrusive, he was interrupted by Halling’s sharp voice on the other side of the kitchen door. “Detective! Better come see this!”
He got to his feet fast, the friendly surface of him immediately gone; what was left was all serious business. He pointed at her.
“Stay here,” he said, and shoved through the door to join Officer Halling. There was muffled conversation. Claire tried to listen, but she couldn’t quite make anything out . . . and then she heard his footsteps coming back and she retreated fast, to stand next to the kitchen table.
Simonds shoved the door open and gestured for her to join him. She didn’t like the grim look on his face— not at all.
Halling had found something in the basement. As Simonds led the way down the narrow steps into the chilly concrete room where they kept the washer and dryer and the dust- shrouded shelves of storage from generations back, Claire’s mind raced.
What could they have forgotten? Shane and Eve were both known to stash things and forget them; what if Shane had overlooked a cache of weapons he’d meant to hide? That wouldn’t be good.
And then she spotted what Halling had found. It wasn’t weapons.
There was a dead body on the floor of their basement.
It was one of the mall cops that had let them in to see Michael.
There was a knife sticking out of his chest, a silver- coated one— and it looked familiar. They had lots of those around the house; Shane silver- plated everything for use as anti- vamp weapons.
Claire stopped on the steps and grabbed for the handrail; she felt light- headed, and suddenly needed to sit down and just breathe.
It seemed impossible. It was impossible. How in the hell had this man gotten here, gotten in, been killed? She hadn’t done it, and she knew Shane and Eve hadn’t. Couldn’t have.
“He wasn’t killed here. There’s not enough blood,” Halling said, crouching down next to the corpse. The man’s eyes were open and covered with a gray film, and he looked unreal, like a depart- ment store dummy. “He’d been dead a few hours, at most.”