Skin Trade

“You want to jump in anytime, Ted?” I let him hear the irritation in my voice. He could help more.

“What Marshal Blake is trying to say,” he said, in his oh-so-reasonable Ted voice, “is that maybe we’re looking for more than one wereanimal. And that if it helped Bendez do this to your officers, then we need to find the son of a bitch.”

I sighed. Hooper had been right; I was complicating things. I pointed a thumb at Edward. “What he said, and I apologize for explaining way more than I needed to.”

“You were shaken at the sight of the bodies,” Olaf said.

“What does that mean?”

“You overexplain when you are nervous or frightened. It is one of the few times you act like a girl.”

I had no idea what to say to that, so I ignored it. I rarely got in trouble doing that with men, unless I was dating them. Then there was a limited amount of ignoring that they would let you get away with.

“The bodies were pulled apart, Hooper; either it was something bigger than the weretiger that I saw dead, or it was two of them working together.”

“There are no bite marks on the bodies,” Olaf said.

“I’m not even sure these are claw marks,” Edward said, and he did what I didn’t want to do. He hunkered down beside the bodies, just out of reach of the blood pattern.

I so did not want to get closer, but I breathed shallowly through my mouth and hunkered down with him. When working with Edward, it was always a little bit of a pissing match. He knew I’d gotten nauseous, so he’d make me get closer to it all. Bastard.

I looked past the carnage and really tried to see claw marks. I had assumed they were there, like my mind had filled them in, but were they really there?

Olaf knelt beside me; hunkered down, he still towered over me. But it wasn’t the towering, it was the fact that he’d chosen to be close enough that our legs were almost touching. I couldn’t move away from him without standing first, for fear I’d hit the edge of the blood and mess. Standing up seemed to be admitting too much discomfort. Then I had a thought.

“You know how I said that I couldn’t think as well in the morgue with you close to me?”

“Yes,” he said, in his deep voice.

“Would you please go kneel on the other side of Ted instead of next to me?”

“Are you saying I am disturbing?”

“Yes,” I said.

His lips twitched, but if it was a smile, he stood and hid it from me. He went to the other side of Edward. With him not beside me, I could think. Frankly, not as big an improvement as it might have been.

I forced myself to really stare at the torn edges of the bodies. “Shit,” I said, and stood, not because I wanted to be farther away, but I have a bad knee, and you can’t hunker forever without it begi

“I think you’re right. I can’t see claw marks. It looks like they were simply pulled apart, like by some giant.”

Edward stood smoothly. “Like a boy pulls wings off a fly.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” Hooper asked.

“I can see no weapon marks,” Olaf said, then stood.

Bernardo said, “Lycanthropes don’t just pull people apart with their human hands. They aren’t as strong in human form, right?”

“I don’t think so, but there’s some debate on it. It’s one of the reasons some lycanthropes are fighting in the courts to be allowed to do professional athletics. If they can prove that the lycanthropy only gives them a little edge in human form, then maybe,” I said.

“The reason no one knows is that when it comes to a fight, they’re like anyone. They use everything they’ve got,” Bernardo said. “If a wereanimal could make claws appear at the ends of his hands, he’d do that, at least, to take out two cops.”

“That would make sense,” I said.

“But just because it makes sense to us,” Edward said, “doesn’t mean it’s what the bastard did.”

“So you are honestly saying we have another rogue lycanthrope in Vegas?” Hooper asked.

“You have something in Vegas, and it’s not just Bendez,” I said.

“How sure are you?” he asked.

“Let the medical examiner look at it all,” Edward said. “Maybe we just can’t see the claw marks. Maybe once the bodies are cleaned up…” He shrugged.

“You don’t believe that,” Hooper said.

Edward looked at me. I shook my head. “No, we don’t.”

“So, was Bendez our guy, or did he just go apeshit for some other reason? Do we still need to question the other weretigers? Did our only lead to the bastard that offed our team die with Bendez?”

“Those are excellent questions,” I said.

“But you don’t have excellent answers to go with them, do you?”

I took a deep breath, a mistake so near the recently dead. I fought my stomach one more time, then said, calmly, “No, Sergeant Hooper, I do not.”

47

I WAS BACK in one of the Vegas interrogation rooms, but this time I was on the other side of the table. Paula Chu was on the wrong side of the table this time. She was the weretiger who had so obligingly knelt in her front yard, waiting for the police to take her into custody. She had also been the serious girlfriend of Martin Bendez. Coincidence? Police don’t believe in it. Coincidence is just a crime you haven’t figured out yet, unless it’s not. Just because you don’t believe in something doesn’t make it not true.

Paula Chu wasn’t much taller than me, maybe five-five or five-six. Her white-blond hair was cut short, but she had enough little tufts of hair artfully sticking out here and there that I was betting she’d have wavy hair if she let it grow out. Her eyebrows matched the hair, and her eyes were the palest blue I’d ever seen, almost white. She wore makeup that complemented the paleness of her skin and accented her eyes, dragging what color she could out of them. She was so overall pale that without eye makeup she’d have looked unfinished, like dough that needed baking. With the makeup she was lovely and delicate as the first blush of spring.

The lovely eyes with their uptilted edges had nothing delicate in them when she glared at me across the table. Why wasn’t she mourning her dead boyfriend? Easy: she didn’t know he was dead yet. She’d gone into this room before the fireworks. I sat across from her and knew that the man she loved was dead, and I didn’t tell her. I was saving it for when I thought it might gain me something in the questioning. Did that make me a bastard? Probably, but after the crime scene I’d just seen, I could live with that.

“Are you just going to sit there and stare at me?” she asked at last. Her voice dripped with hostility.

“We’re waiting for someone,” I said, and even managed a smile, though I wasn’t able to push it all the way up into my eyes.

Edward was leaning against the far wall. He smiled wonderfully at her. “Sorry for the inconvenience, Ms. Chu, but you know how it is.”

“No,” she said, “I don’t know how it is. I know that the police put surveillance on my house, and came and dragged me away. Apparently, I’m a suspect in the slaughter of the SWAT officers and our local executioner.”

I reacted to it, just a tightening of the shoulders, but she felt it, saw it. My pulse went up just a notch. “Who told you that?”

She smiled at me. Her smile didn’t reach her eyes, either. “So that is why I’m here.”

“We didn’t say that, Ms. Chu,” Edward said, in his happy Ted voice.

“You didn’t have to; she reacted to it.” She gave me the full weight of those pale eyes.

I stared into those pale tiger eyes in the human face and felt a thrill of fear, or adrenaline? She meant to spook me, but adrenaline isn’t good for you when you carry beasts inside you like furry hitchhikers.