Skin Trade(115)

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.”





47




I WAS BACK in one of the Vegas interrogation rooms, but this time I was on the other side of the table. Paula Chu was on the wrong side of the table this time. She was the weretiger who had so obligingly knelt in her front yard, waiting for the police to take her into custody. She had also been the serious girlfriend of Martin Bendez. Coincidence? Police don’t believe in it. Coincidence is just a crime you haven’t figured out yet, unless it’s not. Just because you don’t believe in something doesn’t make it not true.

Paula Chu wasn’t much taller than me, maybe five-five or five-six. Her white-blond hair was cut short, but she had enough little tufts of hair artfully sticking out here and there that I was betting she’d have wavy hair if she let it grow out. Her eyebrows matched the hair, and her eyes were the palest blue I’d ever seen, almost white. She wore makeup that complemented the paleness of her skin and accented her eyes, dragging what color she could out of them. She was so overall pale that without eye makeup she’d have looked unfinished, like dough that needed baking. With the makeup she was lovely and delicate as the first blush of spring.