“Frye was here tonight,” she insisted. “Frye and nobody else. But I won’t tell the police that.”
“Good,” he said, relieved.
“Because I’m not going to call the police.”
“What?”
Without explaining, she turned away from him and walked out of the kitchen.
As he followed her through the wrecked dining room, Tony said, “You have to report this.”
“I don’t have to do anything.”
“Your insurance company won’t pay if you haven’t filed a police report.”
“I’ll worry about that later,” she said, leaving the dining room, entering the living room.
He trailed her as she weaved through the debris in the front room, heading toward the stairs. “You’re forgetting something,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“I’m a detective.”
“So?”
“So now that I’m aware of this situation, it’s my duty to report it.”
“So report it.”
“Part of the report will be a statement from you.”
“You can’t force me to cooperate. I won’t.”
As they reached the foot of the stairs, he grabbed her by the arm. “Wait a minute. Please wait.”
She turned and faced him. Her fear had been driven out by anger. “Let go of me.”
“Where are you going?”
“Upstairs.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Pack a suitcase and go to a hotel.”
“You can stay at my place,” he said.
“You don’t want a crazy woman like me staying overnight,” she said sarcastically.
“Hilary, don’t be this way.”
“I might go berserk and kill you in your sleep.”
“I don’t think you’re crazy.”
“Oh, that’s right. You think I’m just confused. Maybe a little dotty. But not dangerous.”
“I’m only trying to help you.”
“You’ve got a funny way of doing it.”
“You can’t live in a hotel forever.”
“I’ll come home once he’s been caught.”
“But if you don’t make a formal complaint, no one’s even going to be looking for him.”
“I’ll be looking for him.”
“You?”
“Me.”
Now Tony was angry. “What game are you going to play–Hilary Thomas, Girl Detective?”
“I might hire private investigators.”
“Oh, really?” he asked scornfully, aware that he might alienate her further with this approach, but too frustrated to be patient any longer.
“Really,” she said. “Private investigators.”
“Who? Philip Marlowe? Jim Rockford? Sam Spade?”
“You can be a sarcastic son of a bitch.”
“You’re forcing me to be. Maybe sarcasm will snap you out of this.”
“My agent happens to know a first-rate firm of private detectives.”
“I tell you, this isn’t their kind of work.”
“They’ll do anything they’re paid to do.”
“Not anything.”
“They’ll do this.”
“It’s a job for the LAPD.”
“The police will only waste their time looking for known burglars, known rapists, known–”
“That’s a very good, standard, effective investigative technique,” Tony said.
“But it won’t work this time.”
“Why? Because the assailant was an ambulatory dead man?”
“That’s right.”
“So you think maybe the police should spend their time looking for known dead rapists and burglars?”
The look she gave him was a withering mixture of anger and disgust.
“The way to break this case,” she said, “is to find out how Bruno Frye could have been stone-cold dead last week–and alive tonight.”
“Will you listen to yourself, for God’s sake?”
He was concerned for her. This stubborn irrationality frightened him.
“I know what I said,” she told him. “And I also know what I saw. And it wasn’t just that I saw Bruno Frye in this house a little while ago. I heard him, too. He had that distinct, unmistakable, guttural voice. It was him. No one else. I saw him, and I heard him threatening to cut off my head and stuff my mouth full of garlic, as if he thought I was some sort of vampire or something.”
Vampire.
That word jolted Tony because it made such a startling and incredible connection with several things that had been found last Thursday in Bruno Frye’s gray Dodge van, strange items about which Hilary couldn’t possibly know anything, items that Tony had forgotten until this morning. A chill swept through him.
“Garlic?” he asked. “Vampires? Hilary, what are you talking about?”
She pulled out of his grasp and hurried up the stairs.
He ran after her. “What’s this about vampires?”