Sucker Punch (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter #27) - Laurell K. Hamilton Page 0,103

to answer it without telling Olaf’s secret. It would be like giving away the secret identity of the Joker, if he had one. I’d have been okay with that, except Olaf, like any good villain, had made it clear that if his secret identity went up in flames, he’d make sure Edward’s did, too. Burning Olaf was one thing. Destroying Edward’s life with Donna and the kids was something else entirely.

“It’s complicated,” I finally said, and even to me, my words sounded lame.

“You’ve said no, haven’t you?” he asked.

“I have.”

“I really thought if any woman alive could make her ‘no’ stick, it would be you.”

“So did I.” Put that way, I hated it even more. I hated that Olaf was manipulating me into dating him, or at least manipulating me into manipulating him into thinking I’d date him.

“What aren’t you telling me, Blake?” And again, Newman was too perceptive for comfort.

“Okay, I’ll be as blunt with you as I can be. I don’t want to have to kill Otto just to keep him from wanting to date me.”

“Do you think it will come to that, seriously?”

I shrugged. “I think it might.”

“Jesus, Blake, just report him to the higher-ups. They’ll tell him to back off.”

“You were a cop, right?”

“Yeah.”

“How many women did you see that died with a court order of ‘leave me the fuck alone’ in their purses?”

Newman went back to looking at the steering wheel. “More than I want to remember.” There was so much emotion in that one sentence that I could tell it had ghosts attached to it: all the people he couldn’t save. That’s the hardest lesson as a cop: You can’t save everyone.

“I’ve decided that I’m a big grown-up marshal, and I’ll handle Otto without going through channels.”

“You let Forrester help you,” Newman said, and looked at me again, the anger in his eyes still raw.

I almost asked, Who couldn’t you save? Whose death are you remembering and blaming yourself for? But I didn’t. You learn early on not to ask certain questions.

“Ted is my mentor. I’m your mentor. I’m not letting my apprentice take this one for the team. It’s tricky enough without me having to worry about you, Newman. I want to make sure that you and that fiancée of yours get to the altar.”

“Are you saying that Jeffries would kill me?”

“Are you saying he wouldn’t?”

“He’s dangerous, yes, but I think he’d rape before he’d kill.”

I had to fight to keep my face blank, because Newman was closer to the truth than I wanted him to be. “Well, you know the saying ‘pillage first, burn second.’”

“Don’t make a joke, Blake.”

“I don’t know what else to do, Newman. You offered help. I’ve refused it. If you keep helping me, then you’re taking my agency away. You’re in effect telling me that I am a helpless victim that needs you to rescue me, and that is not true.”

“If Jeffries were into men, hell, Blake, I might take your help to rescue my ass.”

The phrasing made me want to laugh, but I fought the urge off. “I appreciate you admitting that, Newman, but I’m a woman, and I had to get used to dealing with shit like this around puberty.”

“That is a sad fucking statement, Blake.”

“It’s a sad fucking truth. Now, unless you want to explain to Jeffries where we’ve been all this time, you need to start the car and get us moving to meet up.”

He started the car but didn’t put it in gear. “I don’t like this, Blake.”

“I don’t like it either, but we have a crime to solve and a life to save. We’ll worry about the other shit later.”

Newman put the car in gear. “Fine. What next on the crime solving?”

“I think it’s time to talk to the only other person that was in the house when the murder occurred.”

“You mean Jocelyn Marchand?” He started out of the parking lot and onto the only road through town.

“Yeah.”

“There had to be more than just her and Bobby in the house with Ray, because the footprints don’t belong to any of them,” Newman said.

“Okay, let’s go question the only other person who we know was in the house when the murder occurred.”

“We could just go do that?” he said.

“You mean, leave Otto out of the crime solving?” I asked.

“Why not?”

“One, he’s actually a good man in a fight, and he sees things at a crime scene that no one else will see. If he wasn’t good at his job, I wouldn’t put up