emanating from most of the other mourners. I stopped beside her.
“Ugliest painting I ever saw in my life,” I said.
She turned, and actually smiled. “You got it.”
“You be coming right down to the office?”
She looked over her shoulder toward Toby and Kevin. “We're all in the same car. When the boys”-and she inflected the word disparagingly-“get done trying to score with typically quiet grace, we'll have to take Hanna back, and then maybe we can come on down.”
That could take a while, and I really wanted to keep going with Huck, and not give her much opportunity to reflect and withdraw, or to support the others.
“You could ride down with us, so we can get started,” I said. “They could pick you up at our office.”
“That sounds all right, actually,” she said. “If you can give me a few minutes to say good-bye to some people.”
I found Hester again, passing by Toby and Kevin, who were still hitting on Darcy's friends. I idly wondered how their efforts would be rewarded after Darcy talked with her buddies.
I told Hester about the plan to take Huck with us, and she thought it was a pretty good idea. We wanted to catch the reaction of Toby, Kevin, Melissa, and Hanna when Huck told them she was going with us, so we used the old cop trick of facing one another and making small talk. That way, each of us could see about half the room, and yet appear to be looking at each other.
“At about your five o'clock position,” said Hester. “William Chester just approached Huck.”
“Really… ”
“Don't look. They seem to be talking.”
“Does it look like he knows her?” That would be interesting.
“I don't know. He seems to be doing most of the talking.” Hester paused. “Whoa, she just took a really fast step back. He's moving closer… ”
I couldn't wait. I turned, just as Huck backed up one more step, quickly, abruptly, almost into the wall behind her. Her eyes were wide, and she looked startled and frightened.
I was beside Chester in three or four fast steps. “Mr. Chester,” I said softly, “why do I see you everywhere I go?”
He'd been speaking pretty intensely to Huck, and it took him a second to change directions. “What? Oh, Deputy… uh, Heightman?”
“Houseman. Remember what I told you? About licenses? Hunting?”
“Yes. Yes, I do. But I think you should know some things.”
“Then I suggest you look me up back at the sheriff's department in about three hours.”
“Fine,” he said. He started to turn back to Huck.
“I'll arrange for a ride. Until then,” I said, “I'm afraid this young lady is committed to talking to me right now.” I glanced at Huck. “Are you ready to go?”
She sure was. I extended my right arm between her and Chester, and gestured toward Hester with my left. “Why don't you go over there?”
As she brushed by me, I turned back to Chester. “Look,” I said, as pleasantly as I could, “she's a potential witness. I can't have you bothering her. What on earth did you say to her, anyway?”
He shrugged. “It's of no consequence to you.”
“Don't get cute.”
“Right. Look, Deputy, I don't mean to interfere with the secular authorities on this. Really I don't.”
When someone who's not ordained starts calling me “secular,” I get nervous. “I'd really suggest you not bother anyone else here. There are several cops present, out of uniform. I'll pass the word to keep an eye on you.”
“I can talk to whom I wish.”
I figured I might as well be a complete hypocrite. “This is a funeral home, for God's sake.”
I snagged Knockle as we were headed out the door, and gestured toward Chester. “Get that son of a bitch,” I whispered, “back to the office in about three hours. If he can, let him rent a car. If not, you bring him.”
“Sure, Carl,” he whispered back.
“In the meantime, get his sorry ass out of here before he causes trouble. He resists, bust him, but do it very quietly. Got it?”
“Sure.”
“And try to steal me a cookie, before you go.”
As we got to the door, I half whispered to Hester, “You know? This has got to be the most interesting wake I've ever been to.”
“Glad you had a good time, Houseman, you ghoul.”
The media were still outside, of course. I spoke to Huck, who was right with us. “Engage us in conversation as we go by the news people. Don't laugh or anything, but make it look as if you ride with us every day.” I was glad I'd switched to my old unmarked car. No cage for prisoners.
She nodded. “Think they'll notice anything wrong?”
I looked at her black hair, black lips, and black nails.
“Nah. We'll get by 'em with the least fuss.” I thought she looked a little green around the gills. “You okay?”
“Fine,” she said. “I'm fine.”
When we got to the car, the first thing Huck said when she got in back was, “You always have this much crap in your car?”
Hester turned around and said, “I think he cleaned it last month. You should see it when it's really cluttered.”
I picked up my mike. “Comm, Three.”
“Three, go.” It was Sally.
“Three and I-486 ten-eight, ten-seventy-six S.O., ten-sixty-one one female subject.”
“Ten-four, Three ten-eight, ten-seventy-six. 17:42.”
Just to reassure Huck, I turned to the backseat, and said, “That meant that Hester and I are back in the car, that we're en route to the sheriff's office, and that we have one noncop female person with us.”
“Oh.”
“And she said okay, and repeated that we were headed in that direction in case any other officer needs to know that, and then said the time, to let anybody else know that she was done talking to me and that the channel was clear.” I always do that, when I have a passenger. They like to know.
As I pulled away from the curb, Hester asked Huck to hand her my camera bag, which was sitting among the other debris in the backseat. When she got it, she rooted around for a minute, and produced my bag of Oreo cookies.
“Cookie?” she asked Huck.
We all had one.
“You guys,” said Huck, with her mouth half full of Oreo, “travel in style.”
The ice broken, Hester turned to the backseat. “What did William Chester have to say?”
“Was that the last dude I talked to?”
“Yes.”
“That man is weird. Really. Scary weird. He said that I was going to have to atone for all the evil, and that he would see that I went back to my grave.”
“No shit?” Hester sounded angry.
“Yeah.” She paused. “You happen to know what he does for a living?”
“He hunts vampires, as far as I can tell,” I said.
I could see Huck in the rearview mirror as she hugged herself, as if she were very cold. “Yeah. That's kinda what he said he did.”
