[Anita Blake 17] - Skin Trade (48 page)

I said, “Morgan, Morgan, you in there?”

“Hurry,” Edward said.

I snapped my fingers in front of his face. Nothing. In desperation I shook his shoulder, enough to bob his head, and said, harshly, “Morgan!”

He blinked and raised his head. He looked around as if he didn't expect to be standing in the hallway. I waited for him to accuse me of using magic on him, a serious breach of so many laws, but he just looked around us. “I'll get to work on those subpoenas.”

“Subpoenas?” I said.

“Yeah, so we can get claw mark casts from the weretigers. Either that'll clear them, or we'll know we have our bad guy, or girl.” He smiled at me, a real smile. Then he moved past us toward Shaw, who was finally getting past Bernardo.

“What the hell is going on here?” Shaw asked.

Morgan, still smiling, explained about the subpoenas and all of it.

“It's not possible for them to shift just claws,” Shaw said.

Morgan corrected him and parroted back almost word for word what I'd told him.

Shaw looked past Morgan to me as he said, “And who told you all this?”

“Marshal Blake.”

“She did, did she?”

Morgan nodded and went off to do what I'd wanted him to do, and what minutes before he would never have done at all. Mother of God, what had I done? And was it a good thing or a bad thing?

 

 

SHAW CAME DOWN the hallway, so angry it bordered on rage, and that little voice in my head said,
Food
. I could siphon off his anger and feed. Anger wasn't as complete a feed as lust and romance for the
ardeur
. It was having a snack but not a meal. It had been nearly twelve hours since I'd last fed the
ardeur
. It took energy to heal wounds, and though I'd slept in the shadow of Victor's energy, I hadn't fed off him. Shit, shit, shit, I needed to be away from the other cops, and soon.

“You did something to Morgan. I don't know what, or how, but you did something.”

I moved a little behind Edward so there'd be no chance of Shaw getting too close to me. I didn't trust myself around all that rage.

“You can't hide behind Forrester forever, Blake.”

“Think of it as more for your protection than mine,” I said, smiling sweetly. Which was the wrong thing to say, and the wrong thing to do. Why had I done either? What was wrong with me?

His face began to mottle with his anger. His big hands folded into fists. “Are you threatening me?”

“No,” I said, and tried to make that one word inoffensive.

His cell phone went off, and he stepped away, sort of sideways to us, as if he didn't want to give us his back, to bark into the phone, “Shaw, what?” He was quiet for a few minutes listening, then nodded and said, “We'll be there.”

He walked back to us, the anger level lower, and his face edged with lines that hadn't been there a moment before. I was almost a hundred percent sure what the news would be.

“We have another dead stripper. It looks like it's this Vittorio again.”

I didn't chastise him for not giving us the files on the earlier stripper deaths. The tiredness in his face showed just how much this case was taking out of him. “We'll follow you,” Edward said.

“Fine.” He turned and went back the way we'd come. We trailed behind him.

Edward dropped back and whispered, “Are you all right?”

“I don't know,” I said.

He lowered his voice even more, “You fed on him somehow.”

“His anger,” I said.

“I've never seen you do that.”

“It's new.”

“What else is new?” he asked, and the look in his eyes wasn't one I liked seeing from Edward. He was my friend, my good friend, but there was still part of him that wondered which of us was better. I knew who was better—him—but he wasn't a hundred percent sure of that. There was a part of him that was no longer certain he'd win, and a bigger part of him wanted the question answered. Now he looked at me, not like a friend but like he was wondering how much more powerful I'd grown, and what that might mean if we ever hunted each other.

“Don't go there, . . . Ted,” I said.

He gave me eyes as cold as a winter sky. “You need to tell me about the new stuff.”

“No,” I said, “not with that look on your face, I don't.”

He smiled then, and it was a smile to match the eyes. It wasn't that different from the way a shapeshifter looked at you when they were wondering what you'd taste like, except Edward's smile wasn't as warm.

We were out in the neon-lit dark, but it was still too dark for the glasses . . . had my eyes turned back? I waited until we'd followed Olaf and Bernardo to the SUV. When we were all in our seats, I lowered the glasses enough so I could flash them at Edward. “How do I look?”

“Normal,” he said, and his voice was crawling back out of that Edward cold, to something that wouldn't frighten small children if they heard it.

I handed the glasses back to him.

He shook his head. “Keep them, just in case.”

“What happened to mine?”

“Smashed.” He started the engine and followed the line of police cars that were trailing out, lights and sirens filling the night, as if we were trying to wake everyone up.

“How did my glasses get smashed, and what happened to the windbreaker you loaned me?”

“Bibiana and her tigers wanted to put another weretiger in the bed with you and Victor. I didn't agree.”

Bernardo leaned forward over the backseat, holding on to the seat as Edward took a corner a little fast. “What happened in the hallway, Anita?”

“She did something to the detective,” Olaf said.

I glanced back at the big man, almost lost in the shadows of the car. “How do you know what I did?”

“I don't know what you did to him, but I know you did something. I saw your eyes change.”

“You didn't say anything,” Bernardo said.

“I didn't think we wanted the other policeman to know.”

“Sorry that I blurted that out,” Bernardo said, giving Olaf a look, then back to me. “But what did you do to Morgan?”

I glanced at Edward.

“Tell them, if you want to.”

“You saw what I did.”

“You made him agree with you,” Olaf said.

“Yeah.”

“How did you do it?” Bernardo asked.

“If I said
I don't know
, would you believe me?”

Bernardo said no, and Olaf said yes.

Bernardo frowned at him again. “Why do you believe that?”

“The look on her face when she realized what she had done. It frightened her.”

Bernardo seemed to think about it, then frowned again. “She didn't look scared; nervous, maybe.”

“It was fear.”

“And you're sure of that?” Bernardo asked.

“Yes,” Olaf said.

“Because you know Anita so well.”

“No, because I know the look of fear on someone's face, Bernardo, man or woman. I know fear when I see it.”

“Fine.” Bernardo turned back to me. “Are you a vampire?”

“No.” Then I thought about it. “Not in the traditional sense.”

“What does that mean?”

“I don't feed on blood. I'm not dead. Holy objects and sunshine don't bother me. I go to church most Sundays and nothing bursts into flame.” I couldn't keep the bitterness out of my voice on that last part.

“But you can cloud men's minds and make them do what you want, like a vamp.”

“This was the first time for that.”

The cars had stopped ahead, smearing the bubble lights into the mix of neon from the buildings. We were just off the main Strip, so that the brighter lights of it peeked over the buildings around us like some artifical dawn pressing against the night.

“We're here,” Edward said.

“Which is your way of saying,
Stop asking questions
,” Bernardo said.

“It is,” Edward said.

“I think we have a right to ask questions when we're helping her cover up whatever she's doing.”

I couldn't really argue that.

“You've both volunteered to feed her with sex,” Edward said. “You might want to understand what you're volunteering for before you open your mouth.” With that, Edward opened his door and got out. I didn't wait for an invitation. I got out, too, and left our backseat drivers to scramble out and follow us. Okay, Bernardo scrambled. Olaf just seemed to pour himself out of the car and be walking behind us. Funny that Bernardo was all spooked, but Olaf seemed fine with it. Of course, if he wanted me to overlook the whole serial killer thing, he'd have to be a little more understanding with me. Living vampire, serial killer; po-tay-to, po-tah-to.

 

 

THE BODY LAY in a broken heap in an alley behind the club she worked at, as if when they dumped the body they'd brought her home. The last body dump in St. Louis had been just outside the club where the dancer worked, too. But that one had been clean compared to this, just vampire bites. Death by exsanguination. This woman hadn't had time to bleed to death.

I realized that this one, like most of the body dumps in St. Louis, was in a place where shadows would hide some of the damage. Almost as if even the killer couldn't face what he'd done in bright light.

The woman's neck was at an angle so sharp that I could see spine poking against the skin of the neck, not quite through the skin, but close. The neck was ugly and wrong, but that was nothing compared to what he, or they, had done to the rest of the . . . body.

There were burns on half her face, and going down one side of the body. The skin was red and angry and blackened and peeling, and the other half of her body was perfect. Pale and young and beautiful, paired with the blackened ruin of the other half of her.

Bernardo took a sharp breath in and walked a little way down the alley. I forced myself to stay squatted by the body, and tried not to smell anything. The alley didn't smell that good to begin with, but usually burned flesh overpowers everything else. This didn't. The burns weren't that fresh, or they would've smelled more.

I swallowed hard and stood up, letting myself look at the people around me instead of the body. I had to keep thinking of it, really hard, as the body, because to humanize it at all would be too much. It wouldn't help me solve this crime to think about what this woman had gone through. Honest, it wouldn't.

Shaw stood there, staring down at the body, with a look on his face that I could only describe as lost. Morgan had rejoined us, telling us that he had the subpoenas in the works. He now seemed to think it was his idea, and was back to not being all that friendly with me. I was actually relieved. Whatever I'd done to him seemed to be short acting. Detective Thurgood had joined us in her ill-fitting skirt suit, sensible high heels, and bad attitude. But no one's attitude was particularly rosy, so it was okay.

I asked them, “Have the other bodies looked like this?”

“Not like this,” Shaw said.

“No,” Morgan said.

Thurgood just shook her head, lips in a line so thin that her mouth was almost invisble in her face. From the lips and the lack of talking, I was betting she was fighting off nausea.

“Were the other bodies burned?” I asked.

“The last two, but not nearly this bad,” Shaw said.

“Are you even sure it's the same guy from St. Louis? He never did anything like this in your city,” Morgan said.

“How do you know what he did in my city?” I asked.

“We talked to Lieutenant Storr, and he filled us in,” Shaw said.

I didn't want to tell them that Dolph had not told me about the inquiry from Vegas. I didn't want to admit that someone who I was supposed to be working with had cut me out of the loop completely. So I pretended like this wasn't news and went back to trying to pretend that half the cops I worked with weren't treating me like a perp.

“Vittorio and his people didn't burn any of the bodies, but yeah, I'm pretty sure it's him.”

“How can you be sure, if this wasn't his MO in St. Louis or any of the other towns?” Morgan asked.

Edward had moved up beside me, not too close, but close enough to let me know that he had understood that Dolph hadn't told me. That he understood how much that might bother me.

“Because this is what the Church used to do to vampires they could capture alive. They used holy water, which burns like acid. It was supposed to burn the devil out of them. But the only two I know of personally that were treated like this were both beautiful, very beautiful. It's a lot about the dark side of the Church; they say they did it to save the soul, but they usually pick victims that satisfy some need in them.”

“Are you saying the Church was like a serial?” Thurgood finally spoke in a voice that was a little choked but still nicely angry.

“I guess; I just find it interesting that the only two men I know who were treated like this were very fair of face and body, and they were burned like this. I've never heard of a vamp that started life as plain that they did this to. I'd be interested to know if it was the same priest, or group of priests.”

Thurgood again. “Are you saying that beautiful men were some priest's victim profile?”

“I guess two isn't a pattern, maybe a coincidence, but if I find a third, than yeah, that's what I'd be saying.”

“That's a monstrous lie,” she said.