Deadlocked: A Sookie Stackhouse Novel

but from his thoughts I could read that T-Rex couldn’t think of anyone else to call in the middle of the night. He was tired of conversation with his female companions, especially Cherie, who could not keep her mouth shut.
    I spotted a familiar face among the cops going to and fro in the big room. “Hey, Detective Coughlin!” I said, oddly happy to see someone I knew. The middle-aged detective swung himself around, using his belly as a fixed point. His hair was shorter than ever, and a bit grayer.
    “Miss Stackhouse,” he said, coming over to us. “You found any more bodies?”
    “No, sir,” I said. “But a woman was found dead in the front yard of Eric’s place, and I was in the house.” I jerked my head toward Eric, in case Coughlin didn’t know who he was. Pretty unlikely that a police officer in Shreveport wouldn’t know the city’s most prominent vampire, but it could happen.
    “So, who you going with now, young lady?” Coughlin didn’t approve of me, but he didn’t hate me, either.
    “Eric Northman,” I said, and I realized I didn’t sound at all happy about that.
    “Out with the furries and in with the coldies, huh?”
    Eric had been talking to Pam in a very low voice, but now he turned to stare at me.
    “I guess so.” The first time I’d seen Detective Coughlin, I’d been with Alcide Herveaux. The second time, I’d been with Quinn the weretiger. They had been in their human forms then, and he hadn’t known their second identity since the two-natured hadn’t revealed their existence. By now he’d figured it out. Mike Coughlin might be slow and unimpressive, but he wasn’t stupid.
    “So you’re with the party that came in with T-Rex?” he asked.
    I wasn’t used to the humans being more interesting than the vampires. I smiled. “Yes, I met him tonight at Eric’s.”
    “You ever see him wrestle?”
    “No. He’s a big guy, huh?”
    “Yeah, and he does a lot for the community, too. He takes toys to the kids in the hospital at Christmas and Easter.”
    So, though T-Rex was not a wereanimal, he was two-faced. One side of him did community service and helped area charities raise money. The other side of him hit opponents upside the head with chairs and made out with women on other people’s dining room tables.
    Mike Coughlin said, “If they rope me in to help question, I’ll ask for you.”
    “Thanks,” I said, wondering if that was really anything to smile about. “But I hope I’m through with questions.”
    He went off to have a closer look at Thad Rexford. Pam, Eric, Bill, and I sat together without exchanging a word.
    Vampires are super at silence. They just go into motionless vampire mode. You would swear they were statues, they get so still. I don’t know what they think about when they do this; maybe they don’tthink at all, but just switch themselves off. It’s almost impossible for a human to do this. I guess deep meditation would be the closest state a breather could achieve, and I am no practitioner of meditation, deep or shallow.
    After a while, during which nothing much happened at all, Detective Coughlin came over to tell us we could go. He gave no explanation. Eric didn’t request one. I had been on the point of asking if I could curl up under someone’s desk. I was too tired to summon the energy to be resentful at our treatment.
    Pam whipped out her cell phone to call Fangtasia so someone would pick us up. Dawn wasn’t far away; Felipe and his party wanted to go directly to their vampire-safe rooms at the Trifecta, and the Shreveport vamps didn’t want to wait on a human cab.
    While we were standing outside waiting on our ride, the three vampires turned to me. “What was it the man on the telephone was telling Cara Ambroselli?” Pam asked. “What did they find?”
    “They found a little glass vial, like florists stick individual flowers in?”
    The vampires looked puzzled. I measured one off with my fingers. “Just big enough for one flower stem to soak in water,” I said. “The vial may have had a stopper on it, but they didn’t find that. The vial was on the ground underneath her. They think it had been tucked in her bra. It had traces of blood.”
    They all considered that. “I’ll bet you a demon’s dick that she had a bit of fairy blood in it,” Pam said. “She came into the house somehow, and when she got close to Eric, she uncorked the little vial and made herself irresistible.”
    “Except he could have resisted,” I