Crimson Death

62

HOURS 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.