I sniffed, and rubbed at my eyes. Suddenly I wished I could just curl up in the booth and ignore this day had ever happened.
“I don’t know why he would lie about it. He was angry. He has every right to be angry. I’m angry.”
Jean reached across the table and patted my hand. “Ryder doesn’t have anything to do with this. He might be stupid sometimes, but he’s not a killer.”
The image came back to me of Ryder bursting into the station a few months ago when I was held at gunpoint by a woman. Ryder had handled his gun, and the high-charged situation, like a natural.
Maybe not like a killer, but like someone who knew how to deal with one.
Jean had always sort of idealized Ryder. She’d always thought he should be my handsome prince who would sweep me off my feet.
I didn’t think she’d gotten over him dumping me yet.
“Rossi says it’s his blood. We have to assume he has some tie to Sven’s death. Did we get labs back on that bullet hole?”
Myra speared an apple chunk and used it to wipe up some of the melted ice cream. “It’s a clean shot. 9mm bullet. There were no other bullets at the scene.”
“Any prints?”
“Nothing clear enough. No boot prints, even though it was muddy out by that shed. Any tire tracks would have been run over by other vehicles using the gas station and washed out by the rain.”
“So we’ve got nada,” Jean said.
“We’ve got a dead vampire and a pissed off vampire,” I said. “Rossi was holding a meeting. I told him to let his people know Ryder isn’t to be messed with.”
“What if he’s trying to throw you off?” Myra asked.
“Rossi?”
She nodded. “What if he just wants you to think Ryder was involved?”
“Why would he do that? Ryder and I aren’t dating. We’re barely working together. What would Rossi get out of casting suspicion on him?”
Although, now that I thought of it, Old Rossi had warned me about trusting Ryder before. And Ryder had made a point to tell me that Old Rossi wasn’t who he seemed to be.
Maybe something had happened when Ryder was younger and he still held it against Old Rossi. Or maybe Ryder had done some stupid kid thing that irritated the vampire.
Could it just be an old grudge?
“Do you two know if Rossi and Ryder get along okay?” I asked. “Are there any hard feelings between them?”
Jean licked banana cream off the tines of her fork. “Don’t think they really run in the same circles. Clean-cut Ryder and free-loving Rossi? There aren’t a lot of social situations that would have put them in close contact over the years. Except the festivals and things like that.”
We had four festivals a year in Ordinary. If you asked me, it was four too many.
“There’s one more weird thing about this,” I said.
They didn’t seem at all surprised there would be more weird things. This was Ordinary, after all.
“The other vampires can’t see the blood markings on Sven.”
“Are you sure?” Myra asked. “Can they smell them?”
“Yes, I’m sure. He brought Ben in to prove it to me. I’d never seen Ben so close to a panic attack. He told Rossi all he could see was the bullet hole—he said it was a silver bullet by the way.”
“Silver bullets kill werewolves, not vampires,” Jean said.
I nodded. “Still, any kind of bullet is still a bullet.”
