Skin Trade

46

THE TWO OFFICERS who had been on surveillance were crumpled in the scrub bushes like broken dolls. So much damage that my eyes couldn’t make sense of it in one glance. It’s always bad when the brain goes, Nope, I’m not letting you see that. It’s the mind’s last warning for you to close your eyes and not to add to the nightmares. But I had a badge, and that meant that I didn’t get to close my eyes and wish the bad things away.

All of us with our various flavors of badges stood around and looked at what was left of two men. One was dark haired; the other’s head was so covered in blood that I wasn’t sure. The bodies had been torn apart, as if something very big, and very strong, had used the bodies for a wishbone and pulled. There were a lot of internal organs mixed in with the blood, but the organs weren’t recognizable, as if someone, or something, had trampled them into mush.

“Did they pull them apart first,” I asked, “then walk in the internal organs?”

“That would explain it,” Edward said.

Bernardo had trailed up behind us. Shaw was nowhere to be seen. Maybe Bernardo had distracted him enough for him to forget that he didn’t want me here, or maybe it was all the newly dead officers. Shaw had other things to worry about than little ol’ me.

Bernardo joined us at the bodies, but he looked away first; he usually did. And yes, it was a point against him in my book. Though, frankly, on this one, I sort of sympathized.

“I’ve seen a lot of lycanthrope kills,” Bernardo said, “but nothing like this, not from just one of the things.”

“Well, it was only one of them. We got him,” Hooper said.

The faint, hot wind gusted and brought the scent of bowels and bile, too strong. I felt my last meal start to climb up my throat, and had to step away enough to make certain that if I did lose control, I wouldn’t contaminate the crime scene.

“Are you all right, Anita?” It was Olaf. Edward knew better. Bernardo didn’t care enough. Hooper didn’t know me well enough to feel either way.

“I’m fine,” I said. I hadn’t thrown up at a crime scene in years. What was wrong with me?

Hooper pointed, “That’s Michaels, because of the dark hair, and that’s…”

“Stop,” I said, “don’t tell me names yet. Let me look at it without emotion first.”

“Can you really look at this and not feel anything?” he asked.

The first flare of anger came. It chased back the nausea. I gave him an unfriendly look, but part of me was grateful for the distraction. “I’m trying to do my job, Hooper, and it helps me to think of them as bodies first. They are dead, and they are not people. They are it, the body, no personal pronouns, no humanizing them. Because if I think too hard about it, about them, then I can’t function as well. If I feel too much, I will miss something. Maybe I’ll miss the clue that will help us stop this from happening again.”

“We killed the animal that did this,” Hooper said, pointing back in the direction of the weretiger’s body, though it was all out of sight through the crowd now.

“Did we? Are you a hundred percent sure of that?”

“Yes,” he said.

Edward was watching us like it was a show. Olaf was back to staring at the body. Bernardo was looking away from all of us.

“Did anyone personally see the weretiger we just killed do this?”

Something passed through his eyes-it might have been surprise-but he was too much cop to show it. “No witnesses yet.”

“Then think like a cop, not someone’s friend. We think we got the only weretiger involved, but we don’t know that for sure.” I pointed at the bodies. “That is a lot of damage for one weretiger in a really limited space of time. The blood hasn’t even begun to clot or dry much. In this heat, that means they haven’t been dead long at all.”

“I am thinking like a cop. You’re the one who’s complicating things, Blake. When a wife turns up dead, it’s usually the husband. When the kid disappears, look at the parents. When a girl disappears on a college road trip, look at the boyfriend, and then the professor who was supposed to keep her safe.”

“Yeah, most police work is very Occam’s razor.”

“Yeah, the simplest solution is the right one.”

“Until you add the monsters,” I said.

“The fact that our bad guy was a weretiger doesn’t change how we do our jobs, Blake.”

“You want to jump in anytime, Ted?” I let him hear the irritation in my voice. He could help more.

“What Marshal Blake is trying to say,” he said, in his oh-so-reasonable Ted voice, “is that maybe we’re looking for more than one wereanimal. And that if it helped Bendez do this to your officers, then we need to find the son of a bitch.”

I sighed. Hooper had been right; I was complicating things. I pointed a thumb at Edward. “What he said, and I apologize for explaining way more than I needed to.”

“You were shaken at the sight of the bodies,” Olaf said.

“What does that mean?”

“You overexplain when you are nervous or frightened. It is one of the few times you act like a girl.”

I had no idea what to say to that, so I ignored it. I rarely got in trouble doing that with men, unless I was dating them. Then there was a limited amount of ignoring that they would let you get away with.

“The bodies were pulled apart, Hooper; either it was something bigger than the weretiger that I saw dead, or it was two of them working together.”

“There are no bite marks on the bodies,” Olaf said.

“I’m not even sure these are claw marks,” Edward said, and he did what I didn’t want to do. He hunkered down beside the bodies, just out of reach of the blood pattern.

I so did not want to get closer, but I breathed shallowly through my mouth and hunkered down with him. When working with Edward, it was always a little bit of a pissing match. He knew I’d gotten nauseous, so he’d make me get closer to it all. Bastard.

I looked past the carnage and really tried to see claw marks. I had assumed they were there, like my mind had filled them in, but were they really there?

Olaf knelt beside me; hunkered down, he still towered over me. But it wasn’t the towering, it was the fact that he’d chosen to be close enough that our legs were almost touching. I couldn’t move away from him without standing first, for fear I’d hit the edge of the blood and mess. Standing up seemed to be admitting too much discomfort. Then I had a thought.

“You know how I said that I couldn’t think as well in the morgue with you close to me?”

“Yes,” he said, in his deep voice.

“Would you please go kneel on the other side of Ted instead of next to me?”

“Are you saying I am disturbing?”

“Yes,” I said.

His lips twitched, but if it was a smile, he stood and hid it from me. He went to the other side of Edward. With him not beside me, I could think. Frankly, not as big an improvement as it might have been.

I forced myself to really stare at the torn edges of the bodies. “Shit,” I said, and stood, not because I wanted to be farther away, but I have a bad knee, and you can’t hunker forever without it beginning to complain. I stood, but kept looking down at the bodies. I wasn’t sick anymore, or scared, I was working. It was always like that; if I could push past the ick factor and the emotions, I could see and think and find out things.

“I think you’re right. I can’t see claw marks. It looks like they were simply pulled apart, like by some giant.”

Edward stood smoothly. “Like a boy pulls wings off a fly.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” Hooper asked.

“I can see no weapon marks,” Olaf said, then stood.

Bernardo said, “Lycanthropes don’t just pull people apart with their human hands. They aren’t as strong in human form, right?”

“I don’t think so, but there’s some debate on it. It’s one of the reasons some lycanthropes are fighting in the courts to be allowed to do professional athletics. If they can prove that the lycanthropy only gives them a little edge in human form, then maybe,” I said.

“The reason no one knows is that when it comes to a fight, they’re like anyone. They use everything they’ve got,” Bernardo said. “If a wereanimal could make claws appear at the ends of his hands, he’d do that, at least, to take out two cops.”

“That would make sense,” I said.

“But just because it makes sense to us,” Edward said, “doesn’t mean it’s what the bastard did.”

“So you are honestly saying we have another rogue lycanthrope in Vegas?” Hooper asked.

“You have something in Vegas, and it’s not just Bendez,” I said.

“How sure are you?” he asked.

“Let the medical examiner look at it all,” Edward said. “Maybe we just can’t see the claw marks. Maybe once the bodies are cleaned up…” He shrugged.

“You don’t believe that,” Hooper said.

Edward looked at me. I shook my head. “No, we don’t.”

“So, was Bendez our guy, or did he just go apeshit for some other reason? Do we still need to question the other weretigers? Did our only lead to the bastard that offed our team die with Bendez?”

“Those are excellent questions,” I said.

“But you don’t have excellent answers to go with them, do you?”

I took a deep breath, a mistake so near the recently dead. I fought my stomach one more time, then said, calmly, “No, Sergeant Hooper, I do not.”