Free A Taste of the Nightlife by Sarah Zettel Page B

could.
    “Which leaves us with the questions of where’d he die and where’d the blood go?”
    “And why did somebody go through the trouble of trying to make it look like vampires?”
    “That one’s on the list too, believe me.” O’Grady got to his feet. “Thank you for your cooperation, Chef Caine. I’ll be calling you as soon as I have something for you.”
    I wanted to try to ask more questions, but one look at the detective’s bland face and I knew my lasagna had taken me just as far as we were going to go. So I also stood, and let him walk to the door.
    But at least I had two pieces of new information. The first was that Dylan Maddox hadn’t actually been killed at Nightlife. That was something, I guess. The second was that this was not a spur-of-the-moment act. I know enough about carcasses to understand you couldn’t exsanguinate somebody on impulse. Which meant at least one person had planned his murder, which meant it could very well be one of a set.
    This understanding didn’t make me feel better, because a murder with a plan and an infrastructure behind it is not an idea that puts you in your happy place.
    It also meant O’Grady and I tohared a couple important questions.
    One: If a vampire didn’t drain Dylan Maddox, where the hell did all that blood go?
    Two: If this wasn’t the first murder, could we count on it being the last?

7

    When Detective O’Grady finally let me go, it was five thirty. Hunger and exhaustion robbed me of the ability to consider anything beyond an immediate need for food and caffeine. La Petite Abeille, a little Belgian place where they served big buckets of fries and mussels along with very good, very strong coffee, was only a few blocks away.
    Etienne clasped my hand as I walked in the door, asked the bare minimum of questions about how Chet and I were doing, and got me a table in the back corner.
    The phone rang the second he dropped the menu off. I checked the number and read BRENDAN MADDOX. Had I given him my number? I would have remembered giving him my number, wouldn’t I?
    Not even Trish could get on my case for taking this one.
    “Hello, Mr. Maddox.”
    “Hello, Chef Caine.”
    “How’s your hand?”
    “Sore. Bruised. A little embarrassed, but otherwise all right.”
    I thought about O’Grady’s neat lines of folders and photographs and the strain of sitting through his long silences. “At least it was only a wall you punched.”
    “That’s what I keep telling myself.” Brendan paused. “I’d like to talk to you, if you’re free?”
    I thought about all the things I had to do before I could crawl into bed. I thought about how nice it would be to share a meal with a good-looking guy with a dry sense of humor and pretty blue eyes.
    Then I thought about how his grandfather Lloyd wanted to make my brother illegal, if not permanently dead.
    I told him where I was, and he said he’d find it. We hung up and I drank a whole cup of Euro-strong black coffee wondering if I’d finally lost my mind.
    I also made the mistake of sorting through my voice and text messages. Unlike yesterday, I recognized most of the numbers. That was because they were coming from my employees, all of whom had one question.
    When are we opening again?

    “Hi.”
    I started so violently I almost dropped my phone. Brendan was standing by my table, and I hadn’t even seen him come in.
    “Hi.” I switched my phone off and shoved it into my purse. “Please, sit down.”
    He did so, taking off his hat as he sat.
    “You ditched the lasagna,” he remarked.
    “Turns out you were right. It was a bribe after all.”
    “Did it work?”
    “I don’t know yet. I hope so. If we don’t open up in the next couple days, our people are all going to bail on us.”
    “That fast?”
    I grimaced, thinking about all the still-unanswerevoits in my phone. “It’s a tough business, and most of us live paycheck to paycheck. Restaurants come and go pretty fast, and when you’ve got kids, and