Skin Trade

16

I EXPECTED EDWARD and Bernardo to trail after the body, but they didn’t. I wondered if Edward had gotten the call about the warrants. The three strangers were already suited up and ready to go. Memphis introduced one as Dale and the other as Patricia. Dale had glasses behind his faceplate and short, brown hair. Apparently, he wanted to be extra careful. Patricia wore just the protective glasses. She was taller than me and had her hair in tight, dark pigtails. You didn’t see many grown women who wore pigtails. She was a little tall for Olaf’s preference, but the hair was right. I’d have rather had all men, or at least a blonde. But I couldn’t figure out how to ask without giving away the fact that we had a serial killer in our midst and it wasn’t the bad guy we were chasing. Of course, maybe I should stop worrying about other women and just watch my own ass for a change. No, because I knew what Olaf was, and if he hurt someone, I would feel responsible. Stupid, or just true?

The last man in the room had a camera in his gloved hands.

Memphis said, “This is Rose.”

“Rose?” Olaf made it a question.

“It’s short for something worse,” Rose said, and that was all he said. I wondered what could be worse, for a guy, than Rose? But I didn’t ask; something about the way he’d said the last comment left no room for questions. He just got ready to photograph Dale and Patricia once they started undressing the corpse. The doctor had explained to us that we were not to touch the body until he said so, because we could screw up his evidence. Fine with me; I was never in a hurry to touch the messily dead. And the body on the gurney was messy.

The first thing my eyes saw was darkness. The body was dressed in the same dark green SWAT gear that Grimes and his men had been wearing. The blood had soaked into the cloth and turned most of it black, so the body was a dark shape on the tan plastic gurney. His face was a pale blur where they’d removed his helmet, but his hair was as dark as the uniform. His eyebrows were thick and dark, too. But below the eyebrows, the face was destroyed, gone, in a red ruin that my eyes didn’t want to make sense of.

I knew why Memphis had thought shapeshifter. I couldn’t tell from across the room for sure, but it looked like something had bitten off most of the man’s lower face.

Memphis spoke into a small digital recorder. “The examination recommenced at two thirty p.m. Marshals Anita Blake and Otto Jeffries observing.” He looked at me from where he stood near the body. “Are you going to do your observation from across the room, Marshals?”

“No,” I said, and walked forward. I took a deep breath behind my thin mask and went to stand by the doc and the others.

Olaf came behind me like a scary, plastic-wrapped shadow. I knew he wasn’t spooked by the body, so apparently he was going to use the entire thing as an excuse to stay as close to me as possible. Great.

Up close, the ruin of the face was more obvious. I’d seen worse, but sometimes it’s not about worse. Sometimes it’s about enough. Lately, I’d begun to feel like I’d had enough. If I’d been on any normal police force, they’d have transferred me off violent crimes after two to four years. I was at six years and counting, and no one was going to offer. There weren’t enough marshals in the preternatural branch to trade us around, and I wasn’t trained to be a normal marshal.

I stared down at the body, careful to think body and not man. Everyone copes differently; for me it’s very important to think body, thing. The thing on the gurney was not a person anymore, and for me to do my job, I had to keep believing that. One of the reasons I didn’t do the morgue stakings anymore is that I stopped being able to think of vampires as things. Once a thing becomes a person, it’s harder to kill.

“Once you got the plastic off, you stopped because it looked like some really big jaws crunched down on his lower face,” I said.

“Exactly what I thought,” Memphis said.

There were pale bits of bone showing, but the lower jaw was just ripped away, gone. “Did you find the lower jaw?”

“We did not.”

Olaf leaned over me, spooning his much taller body over mine, so that he leaned along me. He was leaning over to look at the wound, but his body was as close to mine as he could get through his protective gown and my clothes. When I put the gown on, I didn’t think I’d have to worry about protecting my back. Of course, a second gown wasn’t really the kind of protection I wanted from Olaf; guns came to mind.

My pulse was in my throat, and it wasn’t the corpse that was bothering me. “Back up, Otto,” I said, through gritted teeth.

“I think it could be a tool and not jaws,” he said, leaning even closer, pressing himself against me. I was suddenly aware that he was happy to be pressed up against me.

My skin ran hot, and I wasn’t sure if I was going to be sick or pass out. I shoved him backward hard and stepped away from him and the body. I must have moved faster than I thought, because Dale and Patricia moved out of my way, and I had the end of the table to myself.

Olaf stared at me, and his eyes were not neutral. Was he thinking of the last time when he’d forced me to help him cut up vampires, and he’d ended the night by masturbating with blood on his hands in front of me? I’d thrown up then, too.

“You fucking bastard,” but my voice didn’t sound tough. It sounded weak and panicked. Shit!

“There are tools that could crush a man’s face like this, Anita.” He talked business, but his face wasn’t businesslike. A slight smile curled his lips, and his eyes held the kind of heat that didn’t match being in an autopsy room.

I wanted to run out of that room and away from him, but I couldn’t let him win. I couldn’t fail like that in front of strangers. I couldn’t give the big bastard the satisfaction. Could I?

I took a few deep breaths through the little mask and got my body under control. Concentrate, ease the breathing, ease the pulse, control. It was the same way I had learned to keep the beasts from rising. You had to have that spurt of adrenaline; if you could calm it or keep it from happening, then the rest could not follow.

I finally gave him calm eyes. “You stay on your side of the table, Otto. Do not invade my personal space again, or I will have you up on sexual harassment charges.”

“I did nothing wrong,” he said.

Memphis cleared his throat, “Marshal Jeffries, if you aren’t dating this young lady, then I suggest you do what she says. I’ve seen men do similar things ‘teaching,’ ”-he made little quotation marks with his fingers- “women baseball, golf, shooting even, but I’ve never seen anyone try it in autopsy.”

“You are a sick motherfucker,” Rose said cheerfully.

Olaf turned a look on him that wiped the smile off his face. In fact, Rose went a little pale behind his faceplate. “You do not know me well enough to say such things.”

“Hey, man, just agreeing with the doc and Marshal Blake.”

“What tool could do this kind of damage?” Memphis asked, trying to get us all back to work.

“There are crushing tools, used in the meat industry. Some to dehorn cattle, others for castration, and some to cut through the neck in a single movement.”

“Why would someone carry that kind of stuff with them?” I asked.

Olaf shrugged. “I do not know, but I am saying that there are alternatives to lycanthropes for the injuries.”

“Point taken,” Memphis said. He looked at me, and his eyes were kinder. “Marshal Blake, are you ready to see the rest of the body, or do you need a minute?”

“If he stays on his side of the table, I’ll be fine.”

“Duly noted,” Memphis said, and he gave a less friendly look to Olaf.

I moved around the gurney, putting it between Olaf and myself. It was the best I could do and stay in the room. But after we finished with this body, I was finding Edward and we were trading dance partners. I could not work with Olaf in the morgue. He saw the whole thing as foreplay, and I just couldn’t deal. No, not couldn’t, wouldn’t.

Bernardo would flirt, but he wouldn’t flirt around the bodies. He didn’t think freshly slaughtered bodies were sexy; it would be downright refreshing after working with serial killer boy, no matter how outrageous the flirting got.

The doctor started to unfasten the bulletproof vest, then stopped. “Take a few close-ups, Rose.” The doc pointed with gloved fingers at places on the vest. Olaf had already leaned in, so if I was to see what had excited the doctor, I had to lean in, too. Shit. Was I so bothered by Olaf that I could not do my job?

I finally leaned closer and saw slash marks in the vest. They could have been from blades or really big claws. It was hard to tell through the cloth. Bare skin would tell me more.

An autopsy for a murder victim is very intimate. It’s not just the cutting of the body but the undressing. You don’t want to cut or further damage the clothes, in case you mess up clues, so you have to pick the body up, hold it, undress it like some huge doll or sleeping child. At least rigor had come and gone. A body in full rigor is like trying to undress a statue, except it feels unlike any statue you could ever touch.

I’ve never envied the morgue technicians their job.

Dale and Patricia moved in to raise the body and ease the vest off. I never liked being in the room for this part. I’m not sure why it bothered me to see the corpse undressed, but it did. Maybe it’s because it’s a part of the process I don’t usually get to see. For me, the dead are either fully dressed or naked. Watching them go from one state to the other just seemed like an invasion of their privacy. Did that sound silly? The dead shell on that table didn’t give a shit. He was way past embarrassment, but I wasn’t. It’s always the living that fuck up death; the dead are fine with it.

Olaf was beside me again, but not close enough for me to bitch-yet. “Why does it bother you to see them undress it?”

My shoulders hunched, and I crossed my arms over the green gown, flexing my hands in the gloves. “How do you know I’m bothered?”

“I can see it,” he said.

He could only see half my face, and my body was hidden behind the overgown. I knew I’d been controlling how I stood and moved, so how had he noticed? I finally looked at him and let my eyes show that I’d had a horrible thought.

“What did I do now?” he asked, and it was almost that tone that all men use-no, not all men, all boyfriends. Shit.

“Is he bothering you again, Marshal Blake?” Memphis came to stand near us.

I shook my head.

“You say no, but you’ve gone pale again.” Memphis gave Olaf a very unfriendly look.

“I just had a thought, that’s all. Let it go, doc; just let me know when we can come back in and look at the body.”

He looked from one to the other of us, but finally went back to join the others. They almost had him naked from the waist up. Even from here, I was almost certain the chest had been clawed up, not cut up.

“I have upset you again, Anita.”

“Let it go, Otto,” I said.

“What did I do wrong?” he asked, and again it was the boyfriend question.

“Nothing; you didn’t do anything creepy or disgusting. You just acted like a guy for a minute.”

“I am a guy,” he said.

I wanted to say, But you aren’t. You’re a serial killer who thinks dead bodies are a turn-on. You’re damn near a bad guy, and I’m pretty sure that someday you’ll force me to kill you to save my own life. You’re male, but you can never be a guy to me. But I couldn’t say any of that out loud.

He was looking at me with those hooded eyes, except there was the faintest glimmer of that look. You know the one. That look that a guy will give you when he likes you and is trying pretty hard to figure out how to please you, and he’s not succeeding. That look that says, What do I do now? How do I win?

What had my scary thought been? That Olaf was sincere. In some crazy, pathological way, he like-liked me. As in boyfriend-liked me. Not just for fucking or slaughter, but maybe, just maybe, he actually wanted to date me like one human being to another. He seemed to have no clue how to interact with a woman in a way that wasn’t terrifying, but he was trying. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, he was trying.