Mercy Blade (Jane Yellowrock #3)

One of the Vodka boys took a camera to get pics of the ballroom, and moments after he got the first shots, the cops ran him off and stationed a guard there, labeling it a crime scene.

The little green guy turned out to be missing. I made a run to the security room to have the techs pull footage of the hallway near Leo’s office and the carnage in the ballroom and the hallway near the green guy’s room. I hoped that by slowing down the digital feed, we might see him come and go. Within seconds of isolating that footage and slowing the speed down, we saw the green ... whatever it was ... exiting his room. Angel had missed it. I caught an expression of self-loathing cross his face. “Don’t beat yourself up over it. Yoda with fangs can move. Like, faster than human eyes can follow.” Angel just shook his head and cursed under his breath. “Keep scanning footage. Make sure we have copies of everything. I’ll be back,” I said.

I answered so many questions and dealt with so many problems in the half hour after the cops arrived that I starting feeling befuddled; I retired to the nearest ladies’ room for a break, where I saw to my personal comfort, and then leaned against the wall at the sink, closed my eyes, and rested for just a moment. When I opened my eyes a few minutes later, I felt a little better. It wasn’t exactly a minivacation, but it was an oasis of calm in a frenzied night.

I checked my phone, feeling a stab of disappointment when there were no calls from Rick. Stupid, to miss a guy who had only been in my life a few weeks and might be cheating. The thought pierced. Rick might be cheating on me with the were-cat female while undercover. I shoved the pain down hard. Later. Thoughts for much later.

To brighten my night, I had a voice mail from Molly, telling me a joke she’d heard about “puddy tats” that had sent her into hysterics. She was giggling so hard I couldn’t understand a word she said, but her laughter lightened my heart. I saved the message for a future smile.

Putting the cell away, I caught sight of myself in the full-length mirror. I looked tired, pale, and hungry, like some cheap blood-junkie. I needed color and food. I’d managed to hang on to the tiny purse during the clash and freshened my mouth with red lipstick.

Much like the way I’d decorated my face with my father’s blood. The thought stabbed up from the deeps of my mind and twisted, tearing like the killing strike of a barbed blade. I hadn’t mourned Edoda, my father. I hadn’t avenged his death.

I swore softly, the sound sibilant in the bright room. I would mourn and worry later. The job was what counted at this moment. I smoothed my hair back again and scratched my scalp, which was starting to ache, and adjusted the bun and the stakes thrust through it. “The job. Right,” I whispered to myself.

Since the sandwiches were locked in with the press, I slipped out of the restroom and made a quick trip through the kitchen, where I picked up a serving tray of cold shrimp and another one of cheese, which I ate on the way back through the foyer, gulping fast. I dumped the empty platters on a small table and followed the newest arrival to Leo’s office, where all the action was. The guy I followed was the coroner.

It looked to me like Safia had been mauled to death, but the coroner had to make an official pronouncement before the legal investigation could proceed. Louisiana, like a lot of states, has a coroner system in place instead of a medical examiner system. A coroner is an elected official—a person winning the job in a popularity contest, who may, or may not, be as well trained as the job requires. A medical examiner is fully certified, usually a pathologist with training in the related fields of law enforcement, anthropology, and forensics, and is appointed by a politician. We got lucky. The New Orleans assistant coroner who showed up was both—a pathologist with a degree and a vote-winning smile who was being groomed for the office of head coroner. He was also part witch. And Jodie’s cousin, Peter Richoux.

Jodi and I stood in a small crowd in the hallway outside Leo’s office as Peter worked. The reek of blood, buckets of it, starting to go bad, was sickly sweet. Leo stared at the dead woman, Kemnebi at his side. There was no sign of Katie, but Leo looked wan and drained—pun fully intended.

Peter at work consisted of standing and studying the body. For the first time, I allowed my eyes to linger on Safia and catalogue her injuries. Safia was golden skinned, black haired, dark eyed, a small woman but with long legs and delicate fingers. The henna tats on her hands and feet swirled up her limbs to stop at her knees and midway between her elbow and shoulder. If weres shifted like I did, then they lost all body paint in a shift, making the tats expensive in terms of time. If the paradigm held true, the tats also proved that she hadn’t shifted tonight.

Kemnebi was staring at her, grief and horror on his face. He closed his eyes and his body went still for a moment, hunting-predator still, and when he opened them, all emotion was gone from his face. He stared at the scene as if he looked over the corpse of a stranger. But I had seen the vulnerability and anguish.

Her clothes were bloody. She lay on blood-soaked carpet, saturated and squishy beneath her. Her throat was gone, ripped away in three-claw tears, revealing her cervical spine and more about tendons and vessels and muscles than I needed to know. There were puncture marks on her chest between breast and shoulder. Defensive wounds showed on her knuckles; her fingernails were stained with blood and tissue. Hair was caught in the wound, blond like Katie’s. Or maybe my assumption that Katie killed her was faulty. Maybe a human had done the dirty deed, or a vamp, or werewolf. And Katie came upon the scene later. But it didn’t look good for Katie.

Safia’s abdomen at her waist had been gored, ripped into, the descending aorta pulled free, and savaged. It was the work of a large, fanged predator. Likely Katie. I parted my lips and breathed in through my open mouth. The stink of blood and big-cat was overwhelming. The coroner opened his bag at his side, set a plastic sheet under his knees, and bent over Safia.

Peter Richoux had light brown hair and fair skin with a smattering of freckles across his nose that made him look much younger than his actual age, and the perplexity on his face as he studied the corpse subtracted several more years, making him look all of twelve.

He pulled a digital pocket recorder and murmured into it the location, time, date, and the condition of the body when he found it. Kneeling beside Safia, the recorder on a thong around his neck, he opened a black bag and removed a small temperature and humidity monitor that he set on the floor. He took out a cylinder, screwed open its top, removed a long, slender thermometer with a metal tip on the end. He made a tiny cut on Safia’s side, over her liver, with a scalpel, and inserted the thermometer several inches into the cut, checked his watch, again noted the time. He began checking for signs of lividity or rigor. I had seen forensics workups a number of times in my years as a PI and a vamp hunter, but never on a human-looking girl who had been transformed into meat and blood.

He was about five minutes into his practiced routine when Peter stopped and looked around. “Anybody know what the normal body temperature of a were-cat is? When she’s human? And do they form rigor like a human? This is my first were, here, y’all. And it’s not like there are manuals on this species yet.”

Leo turned toward his were-cat guest, his demeanor stating that Kemnebi was the only one capable of providing an answer, and distancing himself from the questioning. The cops in the room looked the African man over, taking in his robes, checking for signs of blood spatter, and calculating his relationship with the deceased. Tension almost crackled in the air, though Kemnebi had no emotion on his face and nothing in his voice when he said, “We stiffen in death just as humans do. Her normal resting temperature is thirty-nine degrees.”

I figured he meant Celsius. Peter pulled out a fancy electronic device like a PDA, only with more bells and whistles, punched some numbers on the keypad and said, “One oh two resting temp.” He looked at the thermometer and his other equipment, punched in some more numbers, and said, “Current temp indicates victim has been dead approximately two hours. Give or take a half hour.”

I spoke into my mike. “Angel. Focus on footage from one hundred fifty-five minutes ago. Find out where everyone was. Make a chart. Note where everyone is at ninety minutes ago. Pull the feed focused on the doors of private rooms and bathrooms. Whoever did this got bloody and needed to shower and change.”

“On it, Legs.”

At least until the DS arrived, which was going to be a good four more hours, meaning after sunrise, Jodi was in charge. She stared at me hard, her cop face on, irritated and anything but deferent, even when she transferred the look to Leo. “There’s a blood trail from the body, and if your people,” she shot a look to me and back, “hadn’t trampled it and contaminated the crime scene, we might be able to pinpoint the killer tonight. As it is, this is going to take a long time to process.”

Leo nodded once, inscrutable and royal, as if giving her permission to continue. I just shrugged. I wasn’t a cop. She had her job; I had mine. My body language must have communicated my thoughts because Jodi’s eyes narrowed and she said, “According to the guys looking over the security footage, Katie was seen running down the hallway on this floor. She was the only person—including the vic, so far—caught on film in this hallway the entire night. Until we know different, I want Katie downtown, under wraps, for questioning.”

“That will not be possible,” Leo said. He looked elegant and urbane and ... clean. Leo was blood free. He’d found a place to wash up before the cops arrived. Contamination of a prime witness was gonna tick Jodi off when she figured that out.

“It’s not up to you,” she said.

The tension in the room went up a notch, a shivery, almost painful proof of Leo’s power. His head rocked to the side in that oddly reptilian motion, the vamp-gesture that always made my skin crawl. “Do you have a place devoid of even the merest hint of sunlight? Do you have chains capable of controlling a Mithran? Do you have ways to meet the dietary needs of a Mithran?”

Jodi swore again. Leo smiled, the expression not remotely human.