“Have you thought about going to the police? They could probably protect you. If they can lock Blake up, you won’t have anything to worry about.”
“You think it really works like that? I can’t go to the cops. They’d arrest me just as fast as they’d arrest him.”
“So leave town,” Rick said.
“And go where? Do what? With what money?”
“I can give you money,” Rick said.
“On a bartender’s salary? That’ll get me to where, Colorado Springs? No, Rick, I’m not going to ask you for money.”
He ducked to hide a smile. Poor kid, thinking she was the only one with big secrets. “But you’ll ask me for a place to hide.”
“I’m sorry. It’s just I didn’t know where to go, I don’t have any other friends here. And now I’ve dragged you into it and if Blake finds out he’ll go after you, too.”
“Helen, don’t worry. We’ll figure it out.” He squeezed her hands, trying to impart some calm. She didn’t have any other friends here—that he believed.
“You probably hate me now.”
He shrugged. “Not much point to that.”
She tilted her head, a gesture of curiosity. “You’re different, you know that?”
“Yeah. I do. Look, I know a place where Blake absolutely won’t find you. You can stay there for a couple of days. Maybe this’ll blow over. Maybe they’ll catch Blake. In the meantime, you can make plans. How does that sound?”
“Thanks, Rick. Thanks.”
“It’s no trouble at all.”
One of the uniformed officers came in to the living room to hand Hardin a paper cup of coffee. Rick declined the offer of a cup for him.
“So she had a criminal background,” Hardin said. “Did she do any time?”
“No,” Rick said. “She was a runner, a messenger. Never anything more serious than that.”
“Prostitution?”
“No, I don’t think so.” He was pretty sure he would have known if she had. But he couldn’t honestly say what she’d done before he met her. “I know she saw a lot that she probably wasn’t supposed to see. She testified in a murder trial.”
“You said that was over sixty years ago. Surely anybody who wanted to get rid of a witness is long gone,” the detective said.
“You only asked if I knew why someone would want to kill her. That’s all I can think of. She didn’t have much property, and no family to leave it to even if she did. But I do know that sixty years ago, a few people did have a reason to want her dead.”
“Only a vampire would think it reasonable to look into sixty year-old motives for murder.”
He hadn’t really thought of it like that, but she was right.
“Do you have any other questions, Detective?”
“What did she do since then? I take it she wasn’t still working as a runner.”
“She went straight. Worked retail. Retired fifteen years ago or so. She led a very quiet life.”
“And you said she doesn’t have any family? She never married, had kids?”
“No, she didn’t. I think her will has me listed as executor. I can start making arrangements.”
She rested her pen again. “Do you think she was lonely?”
“I don’t know, Detective. She never told me.” He thought she probably was, at least some of the time.
“Well, I’ll dig up what I can in the police records, but I’m not sure we even have anything going that far back. When was that murder trial she testified in?”
“1947,” he said. “The man she testified against was Charles Blake. He got a life sentence.”
She shook her head. “That still blows my mind. And I suppose you’ll tell me you remember it like it was yesterday?”
Rick shook his head. “No. Even I know that was a long time ago.”
In fact, he had to think a moment to remember what the Helen of that time had looked like—young, frivolous, hair in curls, dresses hugging her frame. When he thought of Helen, he saw the old woman she had become. He didn’t even have any strong feelings about the change—it was just what happened. His mortal friends grew old and died. He preferred that to when they died young.
Many of his kind didn’t bother, but Rick still liked being in the world, moving as part of it. Meeting people like Helen. Even if it meant saying goodbye more often.
Hardin’s gaze turned thoughtful. “If I were immortal, I’d go see the world. I’d finally learn French.”
Rick chuckled; he’d never learned French. “And yet vampires tend to stay in one place. Watch the world change around them.”
“So you’ve been here for five hundred years?”
“Not here in Denver, but here in the west? Yes. And I’ve seen some amazing things.”
“A lot of murders?” she asked.
“A few,” he said.
She considered him a long time, pondering more questions, no doubt. In the end, she just shook her head. “I’ll call you if I need any more information.”
“Of course you will.”
She smirked at that.
The police were in the process of sealing the house as a crime scene. Yellow evidence tags were going up, marking spots in the kitchen—the teacup, the table, spots on the floor, the counter. Yellow tape, fluttering in a light breeze, decorated the front porch. Time for Rick to leave, then. Now and forever. He paused for a last look around the living room. Then he was done.
He drove, at first aimlessly, just wanting to think. Then he headed toward the old neighborhoods, the bar on Colfax and the garage on Champa. The shadows of the way they’d been were visible—the outline of a façade, painted over a dozen times in the succeeding years. Half a century’s worth of skyscrapers, office complexes, and high-end lofts had risen and fallen around them. The streets had widened, the pavement had improved, the signs had changed. The cars had changed, the clothing people wore had changed, though at this hour he only saw a few young men smoking cigarettes outside a club. None of them wore hats.
If Charles Blake was even alive, he’d still be in prison. Did he have relatives? An accomplice he’d hatched a plan of revenge with? Rick could call the Department of Corrections, talk them into releasing any information about Blake. Just to tie off that loose end and finish Helen’s story in his own mind.
Or he could let Detective Hardin do her job. Hardin was right, and Helen’s sixty-year-old criminal life probably had nothing to do with her death. It might have been an accidental shooting. Some gang misfiring on a drive-by. Anything was possible, absolutely anything. Hardin didn’t need his help to find out what.
Time to let Helen go.
He brought her to Arturo’s.
Arturo was the Master vampire of Denver, which meant he made the rules, and any vampire who wanted to live in his territory had to live by those rules. And Rick did, mostly. What he didn’t agree to was living under Arturo’s roof as one of his dozen or so minions. Instead, Rick kept to himself, lived how he wanted, didn’t draw attention, and didn’t challenge Arturo’s authority outright, so Arturo let him have his autonomy. A lot of the other vampires thought Rick was eccentric—even for a vampire—and he was all right with that. In the meantime, Arturo’s was the one place in the city Blake would never find Helen.