Crimson Death (65 page)

S
OMEONE WHO KNEW
more about jet lag than I did put us in a room with a window. Apparently, as much sunlight as possible even the second day you land in a different time zone helped you not get so much lag in your jet-set lifestyle. Natural sunlight on your skin outside was better, but we'd take what we could get while we looked at the crime scene photos. Nathaniel, Dev, Fortune, Pride, Donnie, and Griffin all went out to sightsee in the sunshine. Nathaniel kissed me good-bye, and I wrapped the feel of him around me like you'd wrap your favorite robe, a comfort object that just happened to be the man I loved. As we drew apart, Dev stepped up and said, “Me next.” I frowned at him, because it was sort of presumptuous and we were in the hallway with police persons watching. I tried not to be too kissy-face at work, because it played hell with your reputation. It wasn't the brilliant smile that made me not be cranky; it was the uncertainty in his eyes that let me know he wasn't sure of his welcome. The handsome, confident Mephistopheles wouldn't have gotten cuddles from me in front of the other officers, but the less confident Dev got more play with me. He wrapped one arm around me and the other around Nathaniel. I had a moment of hugging them both, and it was good, but I suddenly missed Micah. It was like a wave of homesickness for the feel of him in our arms. I tried wrapping my arms around both of the men with me, but when I tried to cuddle between them, my spot on Nathaniel's chest didn't have the curve of Micah's neck on the other side of me. Dev was so tall that my face was pressed even lower on his chest than on Nathaniel's so that I could hear the thick beat of his heart against my ear.
Sometimes when Jean-Claude was in high enough boots, I could rest my head over his heart, but the vampire's heart didn't always beat, so I wasn't used to this thick, constant beat against my ear. It was both reassuring and unnerving, because I wasn't accustomed to it.

Nathaniel stepped back so that Dev could wrap his arms around just me. It left me cuddled against his chest with the sound of his heartbeat thick and sure against my ear. He touched my hair with his fingers, which made me raise my head so I could look up all that tall, broad upper body to meet his eyes. He was watching me watching him, and I realized that I'd taken too long. I should have offered a kiss and let him go off with Nathaniel for their sightseeing. Now it had gone on too long and the sounds around us were growing quiet as the police and other personnel were slowly stopping what they were doing to watch. I didn't look around to see if I was right, or if I was just being self-conscious, because I'd learned that if people were watching you didn't want to make eye contact, and if they weren't watching you felt silly for looking.

“What are you thinking?” he asked softly.

“That I can never decide what color your eyes are.”

He smiled, and said, “My driver's license says blue.”

“So does Nathaniel's, but his really aren't blue,” I said, smiling back.

“I like that you think about my eyes that much.”

I didn't tell him that it was partly because the rest of him puzzled me almost as much as his eyes. I hugged him more tightly around the waist, pressing our bodies even closer together. Close enough that I could feel that he was beginning to be happy to be there, which meant I needed to kiss him and send him on his way before he got to the point where walking was uncomfortable without adjusting things.

I moved minutely so we had a little more room so that I could go up on tiptoe and he could bend down. He brought his hand up to cradle one side of my face, while his other arm stayed behind me to steady me as I rose to meet his lips. The kiss was soft, but with more lips moving than that sounds like, a tender kiss, with just an edge of tongue like a promise for later. Things low in my body responded to him so that I was breathless when he broke the kiss and pulled back to
look into my eyes. If I'd been a man, Devereux wouldn't have been the only one who needed to adjust things before we walked away.

“Wow,” I said softly.

His smile, his eyes, his whole face was shining with happiness. He liked that he'd gotten that much reaction from me. Part of me was happy, and part of me was confused. I kept thinking I knew how many people I had in my life, how many I wanted in my life, and how many were occasional fun and food, and then one of them would do something like this, and I'd want more than just fun and games. Damn it.

Nathaniel took him by the arm and pulled him away. “We'll do more kissing later. I want to see Ireland.”

Dev laughed and let himself be pulled away. I saw Detective Sheridan watching us and knew that there'd be no misunderstandings now about her attraction to this particular tall, blond man. Good. Fortune came up to me, smiling and shaking her head. “I can't follow that. Let's just shake.” She meant it, but she also had come up to get her kiss. She was one of the women in our lives and in our beds, so . . . I rolled my eyes at her, but offered her a kiss. I had to go up on tiptoe for her like I did the men, but our kiss was light and not serious by comparison. Fortune's heart belonged to Echo, whom she was leaving in my care while she saw Dublin for the first time and helped guard the others. But she had asked for a kiss good-bye, which meant the acknowledgment of the relationship mattered to her. Sometimes it's not about romance; it's about belonging, about knowing that someone cares for you enough to kiss you in public and say,
This is mine
. Or at least
I'm thinking of making it mine
. Acknowledgment was important to Fortune and to Dev, to Devereux. Wasn't it weird that I liked him better with that name attached to him?
Dev
seemed unfinished, like a nickname for something longer, and since it was short for
Devil
, which I was never going to cry out in a moment of passion,
Devereux
made me happier. Maybe Shakespeare had been wrong, and a rose by any other name wouldn't be as sweet?

I was actually sad to see Nathaniel and Dev go without me. It would have been nice to go out holding hands and being all romantic tourist with them. But I had a job to do, so I joined Edward in the
room where we'd look for clues. Nicky helped me place Echo and Damian in their lightproof bags at the sides of my chair and then he went out into the hallway with Domino, Kaazim, and Jake to be good bodyguards. Socrates and Ethan had stayed with Magda at headquarters. Socrates thought it would be a good idea to show some of Nolan's people the speed of a regular lycanthrope. He and Ethan were good, but they were slower than Magda because they weren't Harlequin or sleeping with me and Jean-Claude. Though they were going to leave that part out and just say it was age and practice that made her even faster than them.

Flannery got to wait out in the hallway with my guards, because he was there to partner, or back up, or even keep an eye on his boss. Nolan got to join us in the room this time; whoever had his back was pushing hard that he get involved in things. Pearson and Sheridan didn't like it, but they took it like the professionals they were when the top brass above you force people into your investigation. We settled down with pictures of horrors spread on the table, a fresh map of Dublin on the corkboard, and people bringing in actual paper for us since I didn't have an iPad or a computer with me to read things on screen. My iPhone was good for a lot of things, but reading detailed forensics wasn't one of them. I looked at the first victim with their throat torn open and thought,
I really don't want to be here
. I wanted to be out in the sunshine with Nathaniel and Dev and Fortune and even Donnie and Griffin. They both seemed pleasant and would probably be good tour guides for the city. I promised myself that I would get a few days of vacation in here with my people before we flew home. I would, damn it, but first we had a mystery to solve. Why were vampires spreading through Dublin for the first time in their history? Why was the fairy magic of the city's land fading? Why wasn't Damian's old master policing the new vampires or destroying them? Had she really lost that much power, and had she lost it because we'd killed the Mother of All Darkness? How did we find the vampire who had started all this in the city, if it wasn't M'Lady? How did we find the vampire that seemed to be enjoying tearing people's throats out? How did we keep more of the families of Dublin from joining the Brady family as the new undead? We had so many questions; what we needed
were answers, and that was why I didn't get to play tourist. If we solved the mystery, caught all the bad guys and girls, and saved Ireland from its first-ever plague of vampires, then I could be a tourist; until then it had to be all business for me, because if I didn't do my job more people would die. Was it weird that I still thought of the Brady family as having died, even though they were vampires now? I was in love and engaged to Jean-Claude, but looking down at the new vampires in the children's room today, I'd still thought, dead, murdered, not undead, and alive. Even when your murder victims can come back to “life” at sunset, it doesn't always change the fact that they had their lives taken from them. Being made a vampire against your will was still murder in the United States; it'd be interesting to see how Irish law handled it. It takes a while to get used to the thought that your victim can give testimony in their own murder trial. It would be up to Irish courts and politicians to decide if being turned against your will was considered murder here; all I knew was that back home Edward and I would have had warrants of execution on the asses of every vampire involved in this, as I looked at the photos of fang marks, torn throats, and a few bodies just torn apart—killing whoever had done this totally worked for me.

H
OURS LATER WE
had the map covered in crime scenes and locations. Sheridan had stayed to help us color-code everything, though I was certain they had a map somewhere that had all of this already marked. I'd actually asked, “Aren't we duplicating something you've got in your murder room?”

“We don't call it that,” she'd said.

“Sorry, but whatever you call it, haven't you done this already?”

“They want to see if you find a pattern they've missed,” Edward
said. “If they give you their map, then you'll be looking at what they think is important.”

I gave him the look that deserved. “We're wasting time duplicating effort.”

“No, truly, Marshal Blake, we want your opinion without our bias.”

I'd let it go, but I didn't buy it. I was pretty sure they just didn't want me to see all their evidence, just in case I turned out to be an evil necromancer after all.

They even let me pick the colors that went with each thing I wanted to mark. Fine, whatever. A color of flag for the homes of bite victims that had survived and were still not vampires, plus the places they were attacked if it was known in a different color. Flags for victims that hadn't survived but didn't rise as vampires. Flags for people who did rise as vampires. Flags for bodies that were so dismembered that even the police weren't sure if they were vampire victims, or if they had a serial killer on their hands. They were pretty sure it was just vampires indulging in their newfound strength, because of the timing and the fact that you had to be more than human-strong to tear a body apart like that.

Those were the pictures I looked at the longest, because it was rare for vamps to tear a body apart like this. Even as I was looking at them in pictures, my mind refused to “see” them for what they were at first. It was the mind's way of protecting itself, of protecting us from seeing something so horrible that it would leave a psychic wound, almost literally. But it was part of my job to look at things that most people never had to see. I couldn't afford to look away, because there was something wrong with the scene. Something just didn't ring true for a vampire-related crime scene.

I spread the pictures out on my part of the table and forced myself to try to make sense of them. I'd really started to want to listen to my brain when it said,
Don't look. We don't need another nightmare in here
, but I knew that if I flinched I might miss something, and part of me would always believe that something I missed would be
the
clue that would solve the case. Solving the case meant saving lives, so I looked down at the pictures. I wasn't sure at first if it was one body or
two. I saw one shoulder with an intact arm, but no hand. A hand with no arm, so probably a match. Even through all the blood, I could see that the fingers were thick and the hand big enough that I was pretty certain it was a man's hand. The arm looked big enough that it helped me feel fairly confident that it was male. There was a lower half of a body near it that seemed intact and to match in size, so one dead male. I looked at the other bits in the blood, trying to make them into the missing parts of the upper body, but I couldn't do it. I wasn't sure if the parts were just so torn up that I couldn't put them back together from just pictures, or if there were parts missing. If there were missing bits, then this wasn't just vampires, because the one thing they couldn't do was eat solid food. The man's body was one of three that looked like they'd been torn apart. None of the bodies had a visible head in the mess, but there were enough pieces scattered that the head could have been crushed and scattered among all the other gory bits.

“You seem fascinated, Marshal Blake,” Pearson said.

I glanced up at him. “I'm trying to do the serial killer math, and I can't get the body parts to match up. Did you find all the parts to the man's body at the scene?”

Pearson did a look with everyone in the room, including Edward and Inspector Luke Logan. Inspector Logan was medium height, dark, and average looking. He paced a lot, and the room wasn't big enough for it. He'd joined our merry little band a couple of hours into it all. There was already a good-size table covered in pictures and reports, with chairs for five, and the board on its stand with the map. Plus the bags with Echo and Damian in them were tucked up beside my outside leg and the back of my chair. A sixth person would have been a tight fit for the room, but a sixth person who paced energetically and liked to talk with his hands . . . I was rapidly understanding why no one else liked him.

“What was the look for?” Nolan asked from the other side of Edward, which put him at the end of the table. I guess I wasn't the only one on the outside of that knowing look. It pissed me off that Edward was hiding things from me, but when didn't he? He liked his secrets too damned much. He and I would talk about it later, in private.

“I told you she'd spot it,” Edward said.

“Spot what? Why is it important that Blake can't find all the body parts?” Nolan asked. He looked at the pictures in front of me.

“Can you find all the body parts in those pictures?” Edward asked, looking at Nolan.

The Captain was quiet for a moment, watching everyone's face. Only Logan had looked away, arms crossed over his chest, as if he were trying not to give anything away. Finally, Nolan said, “No, but you could have stray dogs, or crows that picked up some pieces.”

“Do you see animal footprints in the blood?” Pearson asked.

Nolan leaned over Edward farther, looking at the pictures. I pushed them closer toward him, but he finally shook his head. “No.”

“We don't rule out crows, or other birds flying in and grabbing some of the body before we found it, but there's no bird native to the area that could carry off enough of the body to explain the missing pieces.”

“What do you think happened to the missing body parts?” I asked.

“I don't know,” Nolan said.

“I was actually addressing everyone in the room with the question, not just you, Nolan. You're as late to this party as I am.”

“We'd like to hear your theories first,” Sheridan said.

“Why?”

“Forrester had his theories, but I requested he not share them with you until you had your own opportunity to view the evidence yourself,” Pearson said.

“Why withhold information from me?”

“Because Ted here has been bragging about you for days, and we wanted to see if you're as good as he said,” Logan said, his arm flung out from his body and half-pointed and half-flapped toward Edward.

“That is not it,” Pearson said, frowning at Logan.

Sheridan stepped away from the map to say, “Ted had some . . . interesting insights about this particular series of photos. We wanted to see if another vampire hunter would come to the same . . . insights.”

They were all being so careful about their word choices; even Logan had been less obvious and that seemed like something he found difficult. I sighed and gave Edward a look. He gave me a steady look back. “I'd have told you, because I know you'll see it.”

I gathered the pictures back from Nolan and spread them out in front of me again. “Did you put these pictures in here to trip me up?” I asked.

“What do you mean, trip you up?” Sheridan asked.

“Trick me.”

“No. I mean, no.” She looked puzzled enough that I believed her.

“Are these photos from another case?” I asked.

“Why would you ask that, Marshal?” Pearson said.

“They don't match. Not just this man, but any of the dismembered bodies.”

“We only have three,” Sheridan said.

I looked at her to see if she was kidding, but she looked totally serious. “Does Dublin get enough dismembered bodies that three new ones are no big deal?”

“No, of course not,” she said.

“It's as rare a crime here as it is back in your city,” Pearson said.

I looked at Nolan and Edward. The first looked puzzled, and the second inscrutable. No one kept a secret like him, no one alive anyway.

“This doesn't look like the work of a vampire,” I said.

“We thought they were strong enough to do it,” Pearson said.

“They are, but they don't usually go in for this kind of display of pure visceral violence.”

“Why not?” Pearson asked, and he was looking at me as if he wanted to see inside my head to exactly what I was thinking.

“It wastes blood and it's messy. Once you tear into a fresh body like this, you are going to be covered in blood and gore. No way could you walk the streets after that and not have someone call the police.”

“Except for the wasting blood part, what you just said could apply to anyone,” Pearson said.

“A human being couldn't rip a body apart like that,” Logan said, flailing his arm nearly into Sheridan's shoulder. He stepped away from her as if she were hot to the touch and went around to the other side of the room near the door.

“It doesn't look like a blade was used to dismember the bodies; am I wrong? Did you find tool marks?”

“No, no tool marks,” Pearson said.

“Then I don't think a human being did it.”

“Then what are you talking about, Blake?” Logan said.

“I'm saying you might have a vampire crime spree and something else has moved into the city, too. I agree it's supernatural, but the one thing vampires can't do is eat solid food. A human serial killer could take souvenirs to eat later but isn't strong enough to tear the bodies apart. A vampire could tear the bodies up but would have no reason to take meat away from the scene.”

“Did you just call the victims' body parts
meat
?” Logan demanded, striding into the room and trying to fill more space than he could. Pearson and Nolan were taller, and almost everyone in the room lifted more weights than showed on their frame, and that included Sheridan now that I'd seen her arms in the short sleeves of her white blouse. She was built like a taller version of Mort, all sinew and muscle except with more curves. She might work at being thin, but she worked out, too. I liked that I wasn't the only woman in the room with perceivable biceps.

“That's what I think our killer thinks.”

“What do you mean, Blake?” Pearson asked.

I fought a sudden urge to look at Nolan. “A shapeshifter could dismember the body without tools and could have just eaten part of the body.”

“But wouldn't a shapeshifter be covered in blood and unable to hide from the police just like a vampire or a human?” Nolan asked; if he felt weird taking part in the conversation, it didn't show. If I hadn't known his secret, I wouldn't have thought a thing about it.

“Yes, but a shapeshifter can literally change not just their clothes but their skin, so that the beast form could be covered in blood, but once they shift to human form again they're blood free and clean.”

“But we should have still found a nude human passed out near the crime scene, and we didn't.”

“I told them that not all lycanthropes have to fall into a comalike sleep after they switch back to human form, but they didn't want to believe me,” Edward said.

“Why not? You're right,” I said.

“Because all the literature says that they fall into a deep, almost
comalike sleep after they shift from animal to human form,” Pearson said.

“Unless you think you two boyos know more than all the other experts combined?”

“On this, yes, because the books you're reading are from people who studied lycanthropes, interviewed them. I live with them,” I said.

“I'm just good friends with them,” Edward said in his Ted voice, “but that's still more personal than the book experts.”

“How can you be so certain of that?” Sheridan asked.

“Because we read the same books you're reading,” I said, “and I read them before I was close to any shapeshifter. Most of them do have to sleep it off, almost like a blackout drunk. In fact, a lot of the ones that sleep hard like that don't remember most of their night in animal form.”

“But you're saying that some of them just change to human form and can walk away from a scene like this?” Sheridan asked.

“Absolutely.”

“Is this the point where I say
I told you so
?” Edward asked in a heavy down-home accent.

“Only if you're not the gentleman I know you are,” Sheridan said with a smile.

Edward gave her a smile and a little nod. If his hat had still been on his head he'd have tipped it at her. I couldn't tell if he was flirting with her, or he was so far into his part as Ted that he couldn't react any other way.

“So you were right about her, Forrester,” Logan said as he continued to pace the wall by the door. “You trained her. You taught her everything she knows.”

“Oh no, Logan. I trained Anita to be better at killing the monsters. She taught me how to understand them better.”

“Thanks, Ted, and thanks for nothing, Logan. Just love it when men assume that because there's a man in a woman's life they teach us everything we know.”

He scowled at me, but he was an amateur compared to Nolan. “It's just a figure of speech, Blake.”

“You just keep telling yourself that, Logan, while the rest of us try to catch the bad guys.”

“What do you mean, bad guys, Blake? You're here to help us find the vampire that's behind all this, so it's just one bad guy.”

“Someone is also killing people by tearing them apart, and that's probably not a vampire, and there are a couple of neck wounds that don't show any fangs.”

Edward picked them out of the pile of photos without me needing to point them out. He handed them to me and I held them up to Logan, Pearson, and Sheridan like I was doing show-and-tell. If Nolan wanted to see them better he would have to move his chair. “Did your medical examiner find any marks that couldn't have been made by human teeth?”