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“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. You remember anything about 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 first.
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 good-bye 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.
Arturo owned a squat brick building east of downtown. The ground floor housed a furniture dealer who did sporadic business, but his real work was deflecting attention from the basement. Underground, away from windows and sunlight, the city’s vampires lived and ran their little empire.
He walked Helen the dozen blocks from Murray’s bar to the furniture store, his arm protectively across her shoulder. She huddled against his body, glancing outward fearfully. Blake would never find them, not the way he moved, casting shadows, pulling her into his influence. But she didn’t know that.
In the back of the furniture shop, a concrete staircase led down, below the street level, to a nondescript door. Rick knocked.
“Blake won’t find you here,” he said.
“I trust you,” she said. She was still looking up the stairs, as if she expected Blake to appear, gun in hand.
What he really ought to do was put her on a train back to whatever town she came from. Tell her to find a good husband and settle down. Instead, he was bringing her here, and she trusted him.
The door opened, and Rick faced the current gatekeeper, a young woman in a straight silk dress ten years out of date, not that she would notice. Estelle hadn’t been above ground during most of that time.
Helen stared. To her, Estelle would look like a girl dressing up in her mother’s cast-off clothes, the skirt too long and the neckline too high.
