“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.