“Are all the bodies like this?” I asked. Olaf was still turned away from the doctor. I’d moved so I couldn’t see his face. I didn’t want to know what he was thinking, and I sure as hell didn’t want to see the thoughts cross his face.
“Are you done with this body?” he asked.
“I am; I don’t know about Jeffries here.”
Olaf spoke without turning around. “Answer Anita’s question before I answer yours.”
“The bodies that I’ve processed are like this, yes; some worse, one not as bad, but mostly worse.”
“Then, yes,” Olaf said, “we are done with this body.” His voice was under control, and he turned around, with his face once again its impassive angry normal.
The doctor covered the body back up. Then we got to see number two. Olaf got to take off his gloves and get fresh ones. I hadn’t touched the body, so I got to keep mine.
The next body was almost identical, except the man was a little shorter, more muscled, with paler hair and skin. His body had been nearly shredded. It wasn’t just cuts; it was as if some machine had tried to eat him, or… With the body cleaned and laid out, you could see the damage, and it was still hard for my mind to take it all in.
“What the hell happened to him?” I asked it out loud before I was sure I wanted to.
“The few wounds I’ve been able to isolate so far seem to have some of the same edges as the earlier wounds. It’s the same kind of weapon, maybe the same weapons; I’ll need more tests to be sure.”
“But this is different”-I gestured at the body-“this is… He’s been butchered.”
“No, not butchered; there was no intent to take meat for eating,” Olaf said.
I looked up at him. “Meat?” I said.
“You said he was butchered, but that was not accurate; the meat is ruined this way.”
“It’s a figure of speech, Otto,” I said, and again didn’t know how to interact with him.
He was looking at the body, and this time he couldn’t hide everything from the doctor. He was enjoying seeing this corpse.
I looked at Memphis and tried to think about something other than Olaf. “This looks almost mechanical,” I said. “There’s too much for one human being, isn’t there?”
“No,” Olaf answered. “A human could do all this damage if some of it were postmortem. I’ve seen people cut at corpses, but this is”-he leaned over the body, closer to the wounds-“different from that.”
“Different how?” I asked; maybe if I just kept asking questions, he’d answer and not be as creepy.
He traced his finger across some of the wounds on the chest. Anyone else around a body would have motioned above the skin, but he touched the body. Of course he did.
“The first body, the wounds are deliberate, spaced. This is frenzy. The wounds crisscross each other. The first one looks almost like a knife fight; most of the wounds are not killing wounds, as if the killer was playing with him, making him last. These wounds are deep from the beginning, as if the killer meant to finish it quickly.” He looked at Memphis. “Did anyone interrupt the scene? Any civilians found among the dead?”
“You think the killer heard something and stopped playing, to just kill?” Memphis asked.
“A thought,” Olaf said.
“No, no civilians, just the police and our local vampire hunter.”
“Is the last body cut up like this one?” Olaf asked.
I’d have thought of it eventually, but I was having trouble being a good investigator around Olaf. My creep factor was getting in the way of my thinking.
“One other member of SWAT is cut up like this. Only the body you’ve already seen and the vampire hunter are cut, as you put it, like they were played with, or offered a knife fight.”
“Do they have wounds on their hands and arms, like they were armed with a knife and fought back?” I asked.
Olaf asked, “How do you know about wounds like that?”
“When you fight with knives, you still use your arms like shields; it’s like defensive wounds, but it looks different. It’s hard to explain, but you know it after a while.”
“Because you’ve had the same kind of wounds?” he asked. His voice had the faintest edge of eagerness to it. I almost hated to answer the question, but… “Yes.”
“Did you see wounds like that on the arms of the other men?” Olaf asked.
I thought back, pictured them. “No.”
“Because they were not there.”
“So no knife fight,” I said.
“Or whatever they were fighting was so much faster than they were, they were not able to use their skills to help themselves.”