Skin Trade(65)

But for today, all I had to do was find a serial killer. I knew I needed to see a Wiccan priestess, and the queen of all the weretigers in Vegas, or excuse me, Chang of all the tigers. I needed to do the tigers before it got too dark. I had clear-cut goals and a time constraint. When a murder investigation this awful is simpler than my love life, something has gone horribly wrong. The problem was, how did I fix what had gone wrong, and exactly what was wrong? I just knew I wasn’t entirely happy, and neither were some of the men. I was beginning to realize that unhappiness might include Jean-Claude. Not good.

I got out of the car and watched the three men come toward me, their faces showing that they’d been arguing, too. Great, we could all be grumpy together.





22




EDWARD HAD BASICALLY been telling Olaf to stay the fuck away from me. Olaf had been telling him that unless he was fucking me, it was none of his business. Oddly, if Edward had been doing me, then Olaf would have accepted that I was off limits. Apparently, it had never occurred to Edward to lie about that. I was just as glad because I could never have pretended that. Not to mention that if the rumor got back to Donna, she’d be heartbroken, and their son, Edward’s stepson, Peter, would never forgive either Edward or me. It was all too weird and Freudian for me.

The good news was that the warrants would be coming soon. Edward had a fax number for the local police. “You really have worked Vegas before,” I said.

He nodded.

Something occurred to me that hadn’t before, and I felt stupid for not thinking of it sooner. “Did you know the local executioner?”

“Yes.” So, Edward, one word, simply yes.

I studied his face and knew that the sunglasses probably didn’t hide anything useful in his eyes, but… I had to ask. “Did you like him?”

“He was competent.”

“Not good, just competent,” I said.

“He had more rules than you and I do. It limited him.” His voice was utterly cool, no emotion.

“So, you’d met the dead operators, too?”

He shook his head. “Only Wizard.”

“Wizard?”

“Randy Sherman.”

I studied his face. “You just saw a man in the morgue who you knew, had worked with, and it didn’t…” I waved my hands, as if trying to grab the right word out of the air. “Didn’t it move you?” The question was inadequate, but it would have been too stupid to ask Edward if he cared.

“Only a woman would ask that,” Olaf said.

I nodded. “You’re absolutely right, but I am a woman, so I get to ask. It would bother me more to have looked at a man who I knew in there. It was bad enough as a stranger. I kept thinking about the SWAT guys I’d met earlier, and knew that all the dead in there had been just as tall, just as professional, just as vital, and now it was all gone.”

“You’d have cared more,” Edward said, “but it wouldn’t have stopped you from doing your job. Sometimes you work better when you’re upset.”

“Do I say thanks?”

“My reaction bothers you, I get that, Anita, but I’ve seen a lot of men die who I knew. After a while you either deal with it better or get a desk job. I don’t want a desk job.”

I wanted to yell at him. Yell that I knew he cared for Donna and the kids. I was pretty sure he even cared for me, but his lack of emotion about the men in the morgue reminded me that Edward was still a mystery to me, and maybe always would be.

“Don’t overthink it,” Bernardo said.

I turned to him, ready to be mad, because being mad at him would be easier than yelling at Edward. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means you’re being a girl, and you need to be the guy I know is in there, or you’re going to weird yourself out about Ted here. You need to trust him, not doubt him now.”

“I do trust him.”

“Then let it go, Anita.”

I opened my mouth, then closed it, then turned back to Edward. “I’m not going to get this, am I?”

“No,” he said.

I did a pushing-away gesture. “Fine, fine, let’s do something useful.”

“When we serve the warrant, they’ll insist that SWAT go with us. They’re very serious about that here in Las Vegas.” His voice was still empty, as if his emotions hadn’t caught up wth him.

“We aren’t hunting them. We’re just gathering information. You and I both are pretty sure Max is too mainstream to approve of his people killing policemen.”

“One, if we’ve got a warrant in hand, SWAT goes with us in Vegas. They mean that. Two, Max is well connected, Anita, which means the local cops don’t want us walking in on his wife and family with a warrant of execution, and no one watching us.”