The man had enough on his plate, he supposed.
Ledger turned the tap off and went back into the bedroom. He grabbed his phone from the dresser and flicked through his messages as he headed over to the window. He’d texted the name “The Skin House” to Lachlan before showering, and there was a brief reply from the other man acknowledging the information was useful but still refusing to promise any results.
Just send what you have, once you have it,Ledger typed out quickly.I’ve got a time crunch.
A bone crunch, too, if he didn’t get answers, but Lachlan wouldn’t care about that. A pointed line of dots hovered at the bottom of the screen for a moment but then disappeared.
Since Lachlan had no updates, Ledger leaned his shoulder against the wall and called Hark.
It was late, but Hark had lost the right to sleep through the night undisturbed when he kicked all this off.
Wren’s truck was parked in the lot below. He was probably somewhere in the motel, sprawled out on cheap white sheets. They were, apparently, still on for that bargained date. Ledger ignored the little swell of happiness he felt at that.
It had been sex. At the side of the road, up against a dirty truck. Ledger reined himself back in before he wandered down memory lane into a distracting amount of detail. It had been fun—more than fun—but it wasn’t something to get sentimental over.
Repeat, maybe, but who knew if they’d get the chance.
He was so distracted by his thoughts that the sudden intrusion of Hark’s voice in his ear—a ready-to-be-irritated “What?”—made him jump.
“Hark?” he said.
“You called me,” Hark said. Then he paused and, in a more sympathetic voice, asked, “Are you drunk?”
“Why would I be drunk?”
“Why wouldn’t you be?”
It was a good question. Ledger rubbed his eyes.
“I’m not,” he said. “Are you?”
“A bit.”
“Get some coffee.”
“Give me a minute.”
Ledger stopped staring at Wren’s truck like a stalker and turned back to the bed. He’d hunted out Bell’s stack of unsettling fan mail earlier to go through it, and once he’d known what to look for, it hadn’t been hard to find the pen pal the thing on the road had talked about. She never mentioned the property or the deed directly, but her conviction that she hadsomethingcoated the paper.
“OK,” Hark came back on the line. He took a drink of something and swallowed loudly. “Go ahead.”
Violet Harlow,” Ledger read the signature out loud.
“Who’s that?” Hark asked. He took another drink and then snorted. “A hooker? Doesn’t sound like your type.”
“You don’t know her? She would have hung around in the same circles as you.” Ledger set the letter back down on the bed. “Or wanted to, anyhow. I know she went to one of the auctions at the Cabots.”
The Cabots was a row of brownstone houses in New York that had been hollowed out years ago to use as storage for their unnatural clients. The long-loved built up a lot of possessions, and murderous habits meant they didn’t always have time to pack before they moved.
Every few months, the Cabots would auction off any lot the owner had stopped paying on. Sometimes it was worth a fortune, sometimes not. Ledger knew one guy who’d paid twenty grand for a storage locker full of obsessively preserved used blood bags.
The plastic ones, not the fang junkies.
There was a pause. “The name’s not ringing a bell,” Hark said. “You got anything else?”
“She’s dead.”
“In our line of business, man,” Hark said, “turnover happens.”
