Summoning the Night
Page 23

He scratched his chin. “There’s always objects. You have anything the deceased might’ve touched right before they died?”
I wondered if Lon could get in touch with his police buddies and find out if they still had anything in evidence. We could contact the parents of some of the original missing kids, but most of them were scattered, and several were dead themselves—it had been thirty years, after all, and they were all in their seventies.
Then I thought of one thing we did have: Bishop’s key, the one on the broken silver chain that Dare gave us. “What about an object from the last person to see them?” I asked. Right away, I could tell by his reaction that it was a long shot, so I ponied up and added, “It probably belonged to the killer.”
“Oh? Yeah, that should give me a strong lead.” Hajo stroked the raised velour striping on the couch with his thumb. “What kind of object is it?”
“A key. A small one. On a necklace.”
Hajo’s brows lifted. “The killer wore it, then? Like jewelry?”
“Maybe,” I said.
His head quickly bobbed up and down. “That’s good. Very good. If it’s been worn on the body, it’s a good tracker. I like working from jewelry.” He considered this for a moment, staring off into the distance, then he focused on me again. “La Sirena is a smaller town. Much easier to track bodies there than in the city. Yeah, I can probably do it.”
“Great,” I said, with trepidation. Because finding a bunch of dead bodies wasn’t exactly my idea of good time. After a few seconds of uncomfortable silence, I asked him about his success rate.
“Pretty high,” he answered in a noncommittal tone.
“‘Pretty’?” I repeated.
“I don’t keep a fucking pie chart on my jobs,” he said sourly. “If you know another dowser, feel free to hire him instead.”
Point taken. “How long will this whole tracking thing take?”
He shrugged. “A couple of hours to all afternoon. Maybe longer. Depends on how fast I can catch the thread.”
That gave me hope. I relaxed a little. My eyes wandered to the TV. Metropolis, 1927. The scene where the robot is seated in front of a pentagram.
“One of my favorite movies,” Hajo said.
“How do you watch something with no sound?” Bob asked, piping up for the first time since he’d introduced us.
“It’s got a score,” Hajo said. “Are you deaf?”
“I meant talking,” Bob said, wiping sweat off his brow.
“I’ve seen it several times,” I admitted, then nodded at the screen. “The restored version is so much better. Easier to see all the details in those elaborate sets.” Funny thing was, Jupe and I had talked about it a couple of weeks ago. I was so proud to be familiar with a movie that he hadn’t seen and memorized already. So I bought him the DVD, one of the birthday presents I was planning to give him next week.
Hajo smiled, his eyes gentler. Almost merry. “You have good taste.”
Common ground with a junkie. Good taste, indeed.
His smile withered as he addressed Bob. “Cady and I need to discuss payment arrangements. Would you please join Cristina in the kitchen?”
As Bob stuttered a vague response, Hajo called out for Cristina, who promptly appeared and herded Bob through the dining room, closing a heavy curtain over the doorway.
I glanced at Hajo. An uneasy chill slid down my spine.
“I don’t have money on me,” I warned, suddenly acutely aware of his expensive drug habit and all the news reports featuring desperate sømna addicts who’d passed tribulation and were stealing or killing for money.
Hajo chuckled. “I don’t want your cash, calm down.”
“What do you normally charge?”
He didn’t reply right away, his attention momentarily distracted by the movie. “I make all kinds of alternative arrangements,” he answered at length. “My other jobs provide me the cash I need.”
My pulse spiked. “And what other jobs would those be?” I asked.
“Nothing to worry about,” he said. “For dowsing, I prefer the barter system.”
“Free drinks at Tambuku for a month?” I offered.
He shook his head very, very slowly. His eyes trailed over me again, languid and dangerous. “Maybe you and I can negotiate a mutually beneficial . . . intimate arrangement,” he suggested in a low voice.
“No thanks. I’m taken.”
He glanced at my hand. “Doesn’t look that way to me.”
“Sorry, try again,” I said as my phone chimed. I tugged it out of my pocket and glanced at the message on the screen. It was from Lon, asking for an update, as if he sensed something wrong all the way from the coast. “Like I said, taken.” I held up my phone and wiggled it as proof.
Hajo made some indecipherable noise as he observed me for several seconds while I stuck my phone in my jeans pocket. “Bob says you were a great piece of ass.”
I nearly choked. “What?”
His eyebrows lifted in challenge.
“You’ve got to be joking.” Not if he was the last lazy-eyed demon on earth. And after I got Bob out of this dump of an apartment, he was going to get a swift kick in the balls for lying. As Jupe would say, gross.
Hajo let out a single “Ha!” and slouched into the couch. “That makes much more sense now. I couldn’t understand why you’d—”