[Anita Blake 17] - Skin Trade (40 page)

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 morgue 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.

 

 

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 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.