her brother-in-law, he kept it to conversation. At one point, Lucy touched his arm, but he pulled off her hand in a gentle but firm way, and she actually saw his mouth form the words: I love my wife.
“Okay, Harrison. Many brownie points for you.”
The rest was exactly what Harrison had described. The other men arriving. Conversation. Photos taken. Harrison leaving early.
On-screen, an unknown man bought Lucy a drink in fast-forward and she drifted away with him. Her flirting was . . . aggressive. Frantic in a way. It made Elena sad. Archer’s beloved daughter was searching for a way to exorcise her grief, but she was doing it in all the wrong places and with the wrong people.
Had it been a man like Hiraz Weir whom she’d run into that night . . . but this was the past. Not the future, subject to change.
Nishant Kumar eventually went over and lured Lucy back from her admirer. From that point on, she stayed with him, Acosta, Lee, and Blakely until all five walked out of the bar—with Lucy snuggled up against Kumar. She looked sober and conscious of her decision, her face set in deliberate lines. Elena slowed down the footage but saw no indication of coercion or drug use. Steady gait, sharp eyes, active in conversation with the men.
A message popped up on-screen: I ran facial recognition on the rest of the footage for you. These five never come back.
Shutting it down, Elena stared out at the city. It was all so pointless. Lucy had been grieving and going off the rails, even courting her hunter father’s disapproval by trying to hook up with vampires, but she shouldn’t have had to pay for that with her life.
A shadow against the wall, swinging so softly.
A single cherry red high-heel lying sideways on checkerboard tile.
A beloved life lost to grief.
Swallowing back the deluge of memory, Elena called Santiago, who managed to conference-call Sara so the three of them could talk at once. The detective had spent the time since Sara’s initial call gathering his files. He had plenty for them, but the gist of it was that the body found in Archer’s car had been too badly burned to offer viable DNA. However, it had been of the right height and ethnicity—as per the forensic anthropologist.
“Guild paid for the bone doc,” Santiago added. “Her report made me feel better about closing the case despite the weird things I’d noticed.”
“What?” Sara asked.
“It was a crash, no doubt about it,” the detective said. “Car wrapped around the center of the gas station like a tin can. Limited skid marks, but there was a ton of rain that night, and it was possible the hunter skidded across the road and his brakes couldn’t get enough traction.”
Rasping sounds as he no doubt rubbed at his bristled jaw. “But here’s the thing—that car went up like a tinderbox, rain or no rain. I had the fire guys look at it, and they said with the gas station going boom, there wasn’t much they could do to find other accelerants if they’d been present. We did manage to discover that the vic was carrying burnables—possibly clothes in bags. Like he was going to donate them.”
“Convenient,” Elena murmured.
“Yeah,” Santiago continued. “But, while suicide was an option because of the shit luck in his personal life, I had no reason to think ‘body substitution.’”
Elena caught something in his voice. “You know what body.”
“When Sara told me maybe Archer’d come back from the dead, I spent a coupla minutes looking up this odd case I remembered from back then. Two of the guys telling ghost stories in the squad room about how bodies had started to get up and walk away from the morgue and how maybe a sleep-deprived doctor had accidentally ruled a vampire dead.”
“A body was lost from the morgue?” Sara swore under her breath.
“When I looked it up, what do you know—same ethnicity as Archer, same height, around the same weight even. Could’ve been the body in the car, but no way for us to know that. Your guy had no metal in his bones, and neither did this missing stiff—and here’s the kicker, the morgue body was never recovered.”
Elena had no uncertainties any longer when it came to the name of the assailant. Everything fit. And the wait for the right type of corpse would explain the delay between Lucy’s death and the start of Archer’s vengeful spree. The problem was they didn’t know enough about