I dabbed my lips with a cloth napkin. After a good meal, I felt much better.
A chalice lay across the picnic table. She was naked except for a striped bedsheet covering her body from the waist to her ankles. Bruised puncture marks dotted her neck. An expression of ecstasy faded from the chalice’s face; many chalices swooned and achieved orgasm when vampires dined on their blood. The chalice relaxed and sighed, content and sleepy.
Carmen and I sat on benches on opposite sides of the table. We had taken turns enjoying the chalice’s rich blood.
A thatched awning provided shade from the noon sun. We were alone in the pavilion of Carmen’s resort. The other vampires and chalices were either asleep in their cabins or playing cannibals and missionaries somewhere else on the island.
Carmen pulled the bedsheet to the chalice’s neck. “Don’t want the poor girl to catch cold.” Despite the hedonistic ambience of the resort and her predilection for walking around topless, Carmen wore a T-shirt and had pulled on beach trunks over her bikini bottoms.
She had wanted me to wear Speedos-an orange banana hammock-but I had put on camouflaged cutoffs and a tank top. I grabbed a plastic bottle from the table and squirted aloe vera lotion into the palm of my hand. After rubbing the lotion on my body, I stretched my legs from the shade and into the warm sunlight. “How did your corpse heist go?”
Carmen smirked. “Stealing ice from an Eskimo would’ve been more of a challenge.”
“Where’s the body?”
“Antoine, Jolie, and I gave Marissa a proper burial at sea. Bothers me that I have to cover up her death when I had nothing to do with it.”
The sea breeze mussed my hair. A rock placed on a sheaf of papers kept them from blowing off the table. I had told Carmen how I followed Johnson, what happened to him on the island, and how I discovered Dan Goodman’s business card. Earlier today we had gotten on the Internet, using the resort’s satellite link, and printed Goodman’s photos and a bio. Considering how much trouble it had been to find him, it was now laughably ironic how simple it was to get all this information.
I took the papers and perused them. “Talk about skating through life. Goodman got his officer’s commission from West Point and spent his career golfing for the army.”
“That’s possible?” Carmen raised an eyebrow.
“Apparently so. After retiring as a colonel, he hired on as the head golf pro with the Sapphire Grand Atlantic Resort at Hilton Head Island. It’s so high-end it’s where the owners of four-star hotels go for pampering.”
“The lap of luxury,” Carmen noted.
“Lap hell, it’s the moist crotch.”
In the photo accompanying his bio, Goodman looked the prosperous, middle-aged country squire with one foot perched on the front bumper of a golf cart, his hands clasping the grip of a nine iron. He wore shorts that showed off well-muscled legs. Unlike with most retired men, there was no hint of a roll around his waist. The logo of the hotel decorated the left breast of his polo shirt. One tip of his collar was flipped up as if to express his carefree attitude.
Goodman projected the confident air of a man with few regrets. Friendly eyes squinted into a bright, inviting sun. An admirably healthy shock of blond hair-cut moderately short on the sides-framed his angular, handsome face.
I handed Carmen the picture of Goodman.
She asked, “This is the man who murdered my chalice and killed your alien friend?” Her voice was skeptical. She returned the photo.
“The trail leads to him,” I said. “Gilbert Odin tells me to find Goodman. Johnson turns up with a dead woman, your guest, with a blaster wound identical to the one that knocked off Odin.”
The chalice on the table started to snore.
Carmen stroked her hair and shushed her as one would a baby. “Why Marissa?”
“You said she was a private investigator,” I replied. “Are you sure she wasn’t here on a case?”
“I don’t know.” Carmen’s aura tightened and dimmed with doubt.
“So why kill her?” I asked. “With an alien weapon?”
Carmen crossed her hands on the table and kept quiet. One finger tapped the opposite wrist and stopped. “What if no one was supposed to find her body? Then it didn’t matter how she was murdered.”
“Good point but it doesn’t answer the question,” I said. “Why kill her?”
Goodman’s face stared back at me from the photo. I couldn’t believe that this man who had slummed his way through an army career as a duffer was my prey.
Carmen must have sensed my dilemma. “Johnson was human, right?”
“Definitely.”
Carmen kept quiet and let her silence raise the next question.
“You’re suggesting that Goodman might not be?” I asked.
“Gilbert Odin did a good job masquerading as human when you first met him,” Carmen said. “Fooled even you.”
I folded the papers and slipped them into a pocket. “Or this golf pro could be a decoy to hide the identity of the one I’m looking for.” I remembered the terrible wounds that killed Odin and Marissa. They must have suffered. And the warning: save the Earth women. From what? Was the murderer human-an earthling traitor-or an alien?
Carmen slipped off her bench and stood in the sand. “There’s only one way to find out, Felix. Let’s go rattle some cages. When do we leave?”
“There’s no ‘we,’ Carmen.”
“Like hell. Marissa was mine.” Carmen wasn’t a big vampire. Standing barefoot, she almost reached my nose. But though I outweighed her by at least fifty pounds, there were lions I’d rather tangle with.
Her lips twitched and the tips of her fangs started to protrude. “You’re saying I can’t handle this investigation?”
“Carmen, don’t put words in my mouth.”
Her forehead remained furrowed while her mouth curved into a malicious grin. “It’s not words I’d like to put in your mouth.”
“Settle down, Carmen. The answer is no.”
“To what? The investigation or putting things in your mouth?”
“Both. We can’t rattle cages, not yet anyway. We start clomping around and we’ll give ourselves away. This investigation is going to require more subtlety than zapping Goodman and munching on his neck.”
Carmen’s fingernails extended into talons. Her aura brightened like a flame. “I’d gladly do that interrogation.”
I couldn’t back down, not if I wanted to stay in control of the investigation. “The murders were to protect some big plan and Goodman is the key. Until I find out what that plan is, I go alone.”
“On one condition,” Carmen demanded.
“I’m not negotiating.”
“Well, I am. I let you go alone, for now, and in return, you owe me two hours of Kama Sutra sex.”
“No, Carmen.”
She grinned and tapped her foot. “Five hours.”
“Nothing doing.”
“Eight hours. You better load up on oysters.”
I raised my hands in surrender. “Okay, five hours.” If I had to, I’d borrow Thorne’s ice pack.
Carmen’s victory pulled her grin into a pearly smile. “I’ll put you on my calendar.”