One Grave at a Time

second thought, make that the whole bottle.

Yet even then, it wouldn’t be enough to couch the devastating news I’d have to deliver: that the nightmare she’d experienced wasn’t going to end unless we caught Kramer, and she’d be part of the lure we would use to attempt that.

Francine sat on the couch, a glass candle filled with smoldering sage in one hand and a mostly empty bottle of red wine in the other. The bottle had been full when I began to explain about Kramer, the other women who were even now going through what she’d experienced, and the part about Bones and me being vampires. Flying Francine out of her apartment kinda let on that we weren’t human, so there was no sense in trying to keep that secret while telling her everything else. Spade, Denise, and my mother got here about an hour after we did, but so Francine didn’t feel like she was being ganged up on, only Bones, I, and Tyler were with her at first. Everyone else was in their respective town houses.

I didn’t know if it was the alcohol or the suggestion Bones had planted earlier in her mind that she could trust us, but Francine was a lot calmer than I expected her to be at these revelations. It was possible she was in shock, and most of what I said didn’t register to her, but her thoughts weren’t in line with that. She had a few token moments of “vampires don’t exist” and “this can’t be happening,” but overall she seemed to accept that what we were telling her was true. Three weeks of being tormented by an invisible entity had evidently disabused her of the idea that the paranormal didn’t exist.

“I knew I wasn’t crazy,” was what she said when I finished speaking. “No one believed me when I told them what was happening. For a little while, I tried to pretend they were right. That I was doing all these things to myself through multiple personality disorder or whatever other psychosis applied, but I knew better.”

Francine glanced down at the wine bottle and let out a jagged laugh. “This is my first drink since all this started. My friends already thought I’d just snapped because of—of other events. I didn’t want them to add alcoholism into their rationalization that what I described couldn’t really be happening to me.”

“What other events?” Bones asked at once.

She balked, and I hastened to add, “We don’t mean to pry, but it might help us find the other two women before it’s too late.”

Francine let out a long sigh, scratching her hand through her sunshine-colored hair before she spoke.

“My mom died about six months ago. Dad passed on when I was really little, so she was all I had growing up. It really messed me up, which was way too much drama for my boyfriend, so he moved on to greener pastures. Then right before he started showing up, someone broke into my apartment and killed my cat. I mean, what kind of sicko does that? They didn’t even steal anything, just killed her and left!”

“That’s awful,” Tyler breathed. He hugged Dexter as he spoke, the dog in his usual spot on Tyler’s lap.

“So sorry for everything,” I murmured. I meant it, but the clinical part of me analyzed this against what I knew about serial killers in general and Kramer in particular. Francine and Elisabeth didn’t really look alike aside from both being Caucasians in their later twenties, so that wasn’t a trail to follow, and aside from the cat murder, everything else Francine related was, sadly, what I would expect. Francine didn’t have many close ties left, making her more appealing to a stalker like Kramer. It was harder to isolate and terrorize someone who had a strong support network around her.

“Looking back, do you think Kramer might have been the actual culprit behind your cat’s death?” Bones asked, zeroing in on the same oddity that bothered me.

Francine rubbed her forehead wearily. “I don’t think so. The person broke the lock on my front door to get in. Did it while I was at work, and most people in my building are gone during the day, too, so no one saw it happen. Kramer never broke anything to get in. He just . . . showed up.” Watery smile. “And then broke everything inside, but never the locks.”

“Destruction of the witch’s familiar,” Bones murmured. His mouth twisted. “Animals as familiars were one of the precepts set forth in many witch trials, and cats were commonly associated as a familiar. This could be nothing more than coincidence . . . or perhaps it’s the accomplice’s first test of loyalty.”

Breaking and entering, plus murdering something innocent for no reason other than warped superstition? Yep, sounded like just the warm-up Kramer might use for his human apprentice. Furthermore, Kramer had to know that animals could sense his presence. He’d tried to kill Dexter the first time Tyler summoned him. Poor dog still had that cast on his back leg, and Helsing would have been in worse shape if not for some lucky breaks. Getting rid of any pets his targets owned meant those pets could never warn their owners of Kramer’s presence before he wanted it to be known.

Prick.

Francine blinked back tears. “So it’s because of me that my cat was killed?”

“You’re not responsible for any of this,” I told her firmly. “Kramer is. Him, and whoever the shit is that’s helping him.”

“But you’re going to stop them, right?”

I had to glance away from the poignant hope in Francine’s face before I promised all sorts of things I wasn’t sure I could deliver on.

“We’re sure going to try,” I said, meeting Bones’s steady dark gaze, “and you just gave us a new lead to start on.”

Twenty-four

“This is the place,” I said, shielding my eyes from the morning sunlight.

I might have lost access to the Homeland Security’s database thanks to Madigan’s new position as boss, but a lot of the information that led us here was all a matter of public record if you were willing to pay a fee. A little hacking into the Sioux City Police Department database provided the rest. In the past two months, approximately 106 households in the Sioux City metro area had reported burglaries. That was a big number if we were doing door-to-door searches, but out of those, only thirty-eight were reported by women living alone. Filter that further by women between the ages of eighteen and forty-five living alone where the burglary resulted in the injury or death to a pet, and that number dropped to one.

If we were right about the connection between dead pets and Kramer, we’d found one of the remaining two women less than six hours after Francine told us her story. Maybe this new woman could give us information that could lead to Kramer’s final intended victim. Then we could start the really hard part: building another trap for Kramer that we could lure the ghost into. We had all the materials. We just needed a new place with a freshwater stream to set them up in.

But we had to do all this without Madigan finding us and screwing everything up again. On the principle that I’d vowed to stay optimistic, I wasn’t about to calculate our odds.

One thing was already in our favor: Someone with a heartbeat was in Lisa Velasquez’s home. I glanced at the clock in the car—10:17 A.M., miserably early for vampires but past the time most people had to be at work. Maybe Lisa had taken the day off. Maybe she worked second shift.

Or maybe she was being so tormented by a ghost that she’d gotten fired from her job for bizarre behavior and frequent absences, just like Francine had.

“We should’ve brought the cat,” Bones muttered, eyeing the one-story house where Lisa lived. If we were right, Kramer could be lurking in there, just waiting for us to cross the threshold.

“Helsing’s almost been killed a couple times. I’m not risking it, especially when we’re pretty sure those past attempts were deliberate, and we only get a two-second warning hiss before Kramer whales on me anyway.”

“His attacking you first the past three out of four times is what concerns me,” Bones replied, an edge to his tone.

“What can I say?” Wry smile. “I’m irresistible.”

Bones shot me a look that said my humor was wasted on this subject, handing me two glasses full of already smoldering sage. Then he took two more for himself, leaving the other two lit containers in the car. Both of us had more sage in our coats, plus the prerequisite lighters, but this time, we weren’t waiting to flame up. Sure, we’d look a little strange to whoever opened the door, but that was the least of our concerns.