Skin Trade

Chapter 45-46

  Chapter 45

  THE NEXT SOUND was gunfire, a lot of it. But the moment I saw the airborne officer, I knew there would be. Martin Bendez was about to die, and there was no way to save him. Whatever information he had was gone. The real kicker was that if I'd been near the front of the line, I'd have helped kill him. When a wereanimal goes a certain level of apeshit, you run out of options fast.

  Cox eased forward, and I followed. Shelby brought up the rear. It looked like almost every other officer in Vegas was already clustered at the front area. They'd made a mass around some point I couldn't see. I wasn't tall enough to spot Edward or even Olaf from the back of the crowd, but somehow I knew that Edward, at least, would be near the front.

  He was like one of those antitank missiles. Point front toward the enemy, and make sure you know where to stand.

  I didn't try to push; Cox did it for me. He just eased us through the crowd. I followed in his wake. Shelby got a little separated, but then he took up more room than I did, so people were more likely to not let him push through. Sometimes smaller is better.

  We wormed our way close enough to the front that I glimpsed Olaf towering over everyone. I knew that Edward had to be close to him. I left Cox behind and continued to work my way closer to the big guy. I actually saw Bernardo first, then Edward, all with their guns still out. All still pointed at something I couldn't see on the ground. Most of the rest of the police had eased up; some had even holstered.

  "It's dead. " I recognized Sergeant Hooper's voice but couldn't see him yet.

  "It's not dead until it shifts back to human form," Edward said.

  "What are you talking about, Marshal?" another man asked.

  I eased up until I was just behind them. I could glimpse a white-and-black-furred body on the ground. "As long as it's furry," I said, "it's still alive. Dead, they turn back to their original shape. "

  Edward almost looked back at me, but kept his eyes and his gun on the downed tiger. "Better late than never," he said.

  I shouldered my way between him and Bernardo, and aimed my gun with theirs. "Sorry I missed it. "

  "No," Bernardo said, "you're not. " Something in the way he said it made me wonder what else I'd missed besides the body on the ground.

  "It isn't shifting, just like the tiger in St. Louis," Olaf said.

  I settled the MP5 tighter in my arms, but not too tight, and sighted down at the still form. I couldn't see any movement, or sense anything but stillness, but the one in St. Louis had done that, too. That one had nearly killed me and Edward's stepson, Peter. It had killed one of our people.

  "I know," I said, and felt my body go still, sinking away into that silence where I went if I had time in a fight. It was a good quiet place to kill things from, the static narrowing inside my head.

  Then the body moved. Someone actually shot into it, but it wasn't that kind of movement. The skin receded like the ocean drawing back from the shore. What was left was a pale, nude man lying on his side. I couldn't tell if he'd been handsome or ugly, because there wasn't enough of his face left to answer the question. There was daylight showing through his chest now because the wounds remained the same, but the weretiger's body was so much bigger, bulkier, that once they changed to human shape, the wounds all looked nastier. Less mass, more damage taken, as if once dead the lycanthropy stopped protecting the human host.

  It took me a few seconds to draw myself back from that silent place. Almost everyone else in the circle of guns had let go of their tension by the time I shook it off and dropped my own shoulders.

  I found Olaf staring at me when I finally looked around. "What?" I asked, and I didn't try to keep the hostility out of my voice.

  Those cave-dark eyes gave me a look that held too much weight, and there was nothing sexual about it. I'd thought his attempts at dating me had been creepy enough, but there was something about this look that bothered me almost as much, even though I couldn't have told you what the look meant.

  "You reacted like Ed. . . Ted and me. "

  "What, am I invisible?" Bernardo asked.

  I don't know what I would have said to Olaf's comment, since I didn't understand it, but Sergeant Hooper was at our side, and there were other things to talk about. Thank God.

  "I guess we won't be finding out the location of the vampire's lair from this one," he said.

  We all stood in the breath-stealing heat and too-bright sunshine and looked down at the body. "I guess not," I said.

  I heard someone yell my name. "Blake, what the fuck are you doing here?" It was Shaw striding toward me through the crowd. Great.

  "Did you find the missing officers?" I asked.

  "Dead," Edward said. He wasn't looking at the body, but outward. He wasn't looking at anything in particular. It was as if he were scanning the horizon for more trouble. It made me look where he was looking, but all I saw was a thin line of small houses and desert beyond, stretching out and out to brown mountains that seemed just as dry and lifeless as everything else outside the city limits. Desert is desert unless you add water. I tried to picture it with the rains and the flowers of the cacti like rainbows scattered across all that brown, but I couldn't. I couldn't see the color that might have been, only the desolation that was, and that was the cop in me. You don't look for what might be in a situation; you take the truth of it and deal. Pretty flowers could wait for the rain, and us catching Vittorio.

  I felt Shaw's anger almost like something touchable. It made me turn away from a hand that I hadn't even seen yet. He had reached for me, totally inappropriate, but I'd moved just out of reach without ever having seen his hand.

  My moving like that, like magic, put my pulse into my throat, so when I spoke it sounded hoarse and not like me. "No touching. "

  "Everyone else but me, I guess," and he said it with as much nasty inflection as he could muster.

  "Wow," Bernardo said, "what is your problem with Marshal Blake, or do you just not like girls? That the real reason the wife left?" He lowered his sunglasses enough to give me a wink as he faced Shaw. He'd done it on purpose to get Shaw away from me. If I hadn't thought he'd take it totally wrong, I would have hugged him.

  Edward started moving away from Shaw's one-sided yelling match with Bernardo. Olaf trailed us like an oversized shadow. Hooper caught up to Edward and me. None of us said a word. It was like we all knew where we were going and what we'd find. I guess the three of them did.

  The first body was SWAT, still in gear. He still had his helmet on, so the body was almost anonymous except for general height. On television they take the headgear off so you can see the pretty actors and watch them act, but in real life most of the men are covered pretty much head to toe. It meant that I couldn't see the wounds that were making the spreading pool of blood underneath him. It's supposed to be safer covered head to foot in gear. The man at our feet probably didn't think so anymore. Of course, he wasn't really thinking anything anymore. Dead is dead.

  The moment I thought it, I wished I hadn't, because I felt it. The soul, the essence, whatever you want to call it, hovering. I didn't look up. I didn't want to try to see the invisible, because even to me there'd be nothing to see. I knew it was floating there. I could probably have traced its outline in the air, but there was nothing to truly see. Souls don't look like anything to me. Ghosts, those I can see sometimes, but not souls. Most of the time I didn't see the souls at the crime scene. I'd gotten better at shielding because souls aren't helpful. They just hang around for three days, or less, and then they go on. I don't know why some souls hang around longer than others. Most of the time really violent deaths send the soul packing quicker, as if they don't want to wait around for more trauma. Oddly, you will get more ghosts out of violent deaths. Fewer souls, more ghosts; I'd always thought that was interesting, but it did me no damn good as I stood there staring down at our fallen operator. His soul was watching us. It might even follow his body to the morg
ue before it moved on. I did not share this information with Hooper. He didn't need or, honestly, want to know.

  It had been a while since a soul had been this loud psychically. But sometimes violence will be so loud psychically to the victim that it gives them oomph. It makes them so loud to my abilities that I can't not notice them.

  I stood in the heat, sweat trickling down my neck, the equipment smothering in the beating weight of the sunlight. People always think you only see spirits at night, or twilight, or shit like that, but spirits don't care. They'll show up any time they can manage to find someone able to see them. Lucky fucking me.

  "Not one of your men?" I made it a question. My voice sounded normal, as if I weren't working at not seeing someone's soul floating above us.

  "No, it's Glick. He was one of the first psychics we hired. "

  "That might explain it," I said.

  "Explain what?" Hooper asked.

  Edward actually brushed my arm with his fingertips, like a warning. "Marshal Blake sometimes picks up impressions from the dead. "

  "I'm not a psychic like one you'd bring in to help solve a case through visions," I added, "but I feel the dead sometimes, all kinds of dead. "

  "You can feel Glick?"

  "Something like that. "

  "Talking in your head?"

  "No, the dead don't talk that clearly to me. Call it more emotions. "

  "What kind of emotions? Fear?"

  "No," I said.

  "Then what?"

  I cursed myself for saying that first little comment out loud. I told part of the truth. "Puzzlement. He's puzzled. "

  "Puzzled about what?"

  "About being dead," I said.

  Hooper stared at the body. "You mean he's in there thinking?"

  "No, not at all," I said.

  Edward shook his head. "Tell him; what he's imagining is worse. "

  "Please don't share with anyone else that I can do this, but sometimes I can sense the souls of the freshly dead. "

  "Souls; you mean ghosts," Hooper said.

  "No, I mean souls. Ghosts come later, and most of the time feel really different. "

  "So Glick's soul is floating around here?"

  "It happens. He'll watch for a while, and then he'll go on. "

  "You mean to heaven?"

  I said the only thing I could. "Yes, that's what I mean. "

  Olaf, who had been so quiet throughout, said, "Could it not go to hell?"

  Shit.

  Hooper glanced at Olaf, then back to me. "Well, Blake? Glick was Jewish; does that mean he burns?"

  "Was he a good man?"

  "Yes. He loved his wife and kids, and he was a good man. "

  "I believe that good is good, so you go to heaven. "

  He motioned off toward some scrubby bushes. "Matchett was a bastard. He cheated on his wife. He had a gambling problem and was about to get kicked off the team. Is he in hell?"

  I wanted to say, Why ask me? How did I end up having a philosophical discussion over the bodies? "I'm Christian, but if God is truly a God of love, then why would he have a private torture chamber where he put people that he was supposed to love and forgive to be punished forever? If you actually read the Bible, the idea of hell like in the movies and most books was invented by a writer. Dante's Inferno was ripped off by the Church to give people something to be afraid of, to literally scare people into being Christian. "

  "So, you don't believe in hell. "

  Philosophically, no. Truthfully, once a Catholic, always a Catholic, but out loud, because it was the answer he needed while staring down at his dead friend, I said, "No, I don't. " No lightning bolt struck me. Maybe if you lie for a good reason, you get a pass.

  Chapter 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 weret
iger 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. "