American Vampire (Vampire for Hire Book 3) by J.R. Rain

Author:J.R. Rain [Rain, J.R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-03-28T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirty-two

Still reeling from my encounter with Aaron King, whose real name, of course, wasn’t Aaron King, I found myself at the Wharton Museum.

Danny had promised to call me immediately if anything came up, and since I hadn’t received a call, I might as well keep working, right? And with Aaron still working the case in Buena Park, I thought it was best to tackle some of my paying work.

I might be undead. I might drink blood. And I might be one hell of a freaky chick, but I still needed to feed my kids and pay my bills.

Still in my van, I removed my secret stash of foundation make-up, which I often applied heavily to my face and the back of my hands. I may not show up in mirrors or on surveillance video—weird as hell, I know—but the make-up still did. And after a long night of pounding doors and breaking fingers, well, I wasn’t sure how much of my make-up was still in place.

I had already been introduced to the head night security guard, whose name was Eddie. Eddie was a heavy-set Hispanic guy who seemed as cool as cool gets, and oozed a smooth confidence. The way he carried himself, you would have thought he looked a little more like George Clooney and a lot less like Chris Farley.

Then again, I always did think Chris Farley was a cutie.

We were in Eddie’s office, which was just inside the main doors of the museum. His office looked a little like Mission Control, minus all the nerds in white short-sleeved, button-down dress shirts. There were ten monitors placed in and around his desk, all providing live feeds from within the museum. While we sat, he cycled through some exterior cameras and some back-room cameras. All in all, there were over twenty cameras situated throughout the small museum.

Eddie leaned back in his swivel chair, a chair that looked abused and ready to give out. I was sitting in a metal foldout chair he had grabbed from a storage closet behind him. The cold metal was almost as cold as my own flesh.

Eddie, to his credit, rarely took his eyes off the monitors. There was a Starbucks coffee sitting next to a keyboard. The keyboard had old coffee stains on it. I wondered how many keyboards Eddie had fried spilling his coffees.

“Would you mind telling me about the night the crystal sculpture was stolen?” I asked.

He shrugged defensively. “Like any other night.”

I waited. Eddie stared at the monitors. Apparently that’s all I was getting.

I said, “So nothing out of the ordinary?”

“Nothing other than our back-room cameras suddenly stopped working.”

“Did the theft take place in the back room?”

“Wow, you’re good,” he said, still not looking at me. “It’s no wonder they hired you.”

I ignored the remark. “How long were the cameras not working?”

“Twenty-one minutes.”

“Did you catch this immediately?”

He shook his head. “Both pictures were frozen in place. How they did it, we have no clue. But the image looked fine, until I noticed the timer had stopped.

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