“I stand corrected, Sheriff. You’re absolutely right. I think you must deal with more suicides than I do.”
“We’ve had more than you’d think in a town this size,” he said, and he looked suddenly weary. Tired didn’t cover it. He hitched his duty belt up again, as if trying to move it back where it used to ride. It looked like a habitual gesture that didn’t quite work anymore, like brushing your hair back from your face after you cut it short.
“The only people that die on my watch don’t die by suicide,” I said.
“The first uniform I wore was army. I saw combat. I thought that was bad, but sometimes I miss it. It’s cleaner than dying by inches in a backwater town.” Duke sounded wistful, or way too honest to be talking in front of a stranger.
It was Newman who asked, “You okay, Duke?”
It’s against the guy code to ask things like that, but sometimes when you start off talking about suicide and hear such bitter defeat come out of someone’s mouth, you break the rules. Most of us who wear a uniform have learned that we can’t keep the guy code of silence when one of our own is in pain. We lose too many people that way, both male and female. Twenty-two combat veterans die every day in the United States alone from suicide, and it isn’t just soldiers who have just come home from their tours of duty. There is no statute of limitations on nightmares and depression. With numbers like that, we need to start talking to one another more.
I was still glad that Newman had done the asking. I didn’t know Duke well enough to be that personal.
Duke shook his head. “I’ve known Ray for over thirty years. I was here when his sister and her husband died and left Bobby an orphan. Kid was two, three back then, and Ray had never had time for children of his own. He was all career after college, but he changed his li
fe so he could be a dad to that little boy. That’s when he sold his company, because he couldn’t be a CEO and a dad. He told me that once, just like that. Selling when he did meant he got the most money he’d have ever gotten for the company, and he was out of it when the crash came, but he didn’t know it when he did it. He loved that boy like he was his own, and now he’s dead, bad dead. Last thing I saw that bad was a bear attack, and that was nearly ten years ago. It was no way for Ray to die, and now Bobby’s going to die, too.” He shook his head again. His eyes were a little shiny as he got his hat and said, “I’ll take you out to the crime scene.”
“I know the way, Duke,” Newman said, voice gentle.
“I know you do, Win, but all the same, I’ll go along.”
“I’d like to talk to Bobby before we go,” Newman said.
I did not want to talk to the prisoner, because right now he was abstract, not as real as Leduc, who had just let us see his pain. I didn’t want Bobby Marchand to be real to me. I needed as much emotional distance as I could get, because I was beginning to realize I might be the only badge in town who wasn’t emotionally compromised. I still believed that Newman would do his duty in the end, but I was beginning to understand how much it might cost him. It would stay his warrant, but if we both agreed that it would cost me less to execute it, then it might be me staring down the barrel of a gun at the prisoner. If I was going to have to kill someone who was chained up and couldn’t get away, then I’d want all the emotional distance I could get. Give me a straight-up hunt after a monster that was trying to kill me, and I was fine, but shooting chained-up fish in a jail cell, that would be a new one even for me. I did not want to speak with the prisoner, not if I was going to have to shoot him later, but when Newman went through the door in the back wall, I followed him. It took a lot more courage than I’d have admitted out loud. There was no win here for me, or for Newman. Hell, there was no win for anyone.
2
THERE WERE TWO cells, with a narrow hallway leading to a closed door at the end. A deputy sat in a chair by the wall with a shotgun across her lap. She stood as we entered, the shotgun held loose in one hand, the barrel pointed safely at the concrete floor. All the skin that showed around the uniform was a deep brown. I thought she might be Mexican like my mother, or at least some flavor of Hispanic, but a second look showed that the nice dark skin tone didn’t come from south of the border but somewhere more east.
Her hair was as black as mine, but straight and tied back in a neat ponytail. My curls never went back into a ponytail that neatly, which is why my fiancé had helped me French-braid it before I got on the plane. Sheriff Leduc introduced her as his deputy, Frances (call her Frankie) Anthony.
We all shook hands as if there wasn’t another person in the room—well, in the cell. You don’t have to have a badge long before you start to think differently about prisoners. It’s partially self-preservation, especially for marshals in the preternatural branch like Newman and me. It’s harder to kill someone if you think of them as people just like you and me. Everyone but me knew this prisoner, and yet they still introduced me to the deputy first as if Bobby Marchand weren’t within hearing distance. I wondered if they even knew they’d done it.
Newman turned to the cell without introducing me to the man inside it. “How are you doing, Bobby?”
Bobby Marchand blinked at us with blue eyes so large that they dominated his face to the point they were all you saw at first, like he was an anime character. Of course, it might have been the mask of dried blood surrounding his baby blues that made them so startling. The contrast must have been even more extreme when the blood had been fresh and red. Now it was a tired sort of brick red heading toward brown; most people would have thought it was dried mud. They’d never have guessed it was blood until they saw what happened in a shower. Water would bring it back to life, and suddenly the mud would look like something far more liquid than dirt. Bobby’s short blond hair had one spot of drying blood in it; the rest was disheveled but clean. He had a gray blanket wrapped around himself, so most of him was covered. The hint of chest that showed had blood drying on it, but the shoulders and arms that were holding the blanket in place were clean; his hands were not. There was even blood dried on the cuff around his right wrist. The chain from it went to the metal frame of the bed beside him. The bed was chained to the concrete floor, and there was a second chain that trailed underneath the blanket toward the leg of the bed, so he was shackled on at least one ankle, too. They looked like ordinary restraints, not the new stuff specifically designed for supernatural prisoners with their supernatural strength, which meant that if Bobby wanted to break his chains, he could, even in human form. Even the bars wouldn’t hold if he really wanted out, but it would take longer—long enough for the officer on guard duty to shoot him and hope they could kill him before he could finish shifting into his even stronger other half. That they had the deputy on watch outside the cell with a shotgun meant they understood some of it, and they probably didn’t have the budget for the new special restraints. Even some major cities couldn’t afford more than a couple of full sets.
Bobby fidgeted, clutching his blanket tighter. He’d tried to clean his hands by wiping them on the blanket in a few places, but the blood had embedded around his nails and into the pores of his skin. Even a shower wouldn’t get it all now. I knew from experience that if you didn’t wear gloves when there was that much blood, it was a serious bitch to get it cleaned out from around your nails. Under your nails you could do, but the cuticles and the edges of the nails were the challenge. It was just his hands that were covered in dried blood; it didn’t go past either wrist. In that moment I believed that Bobby Marchand was being framed. Whoever had done the blood evidence on him hadn’t known that if someone plunged bare hands into a still living body, or even a freshly dead one, the blood wouldn’t stop neatly at the wrists. It would climb up the arms, and there would be blood spatter on the chest, not the thick coating that someone had painted on Bobby. It was all wrong, but unless you’d seen as many lycanthrope kills as I had, or waded through enough gory murder scenes, you wouldn’t think about the right things. You wouldn’t know where to put the blood.
“How am I supposed to be, Win? I killed Uncle Ray.”
“We’re not convinced of that, Bobby. I’m still gathering evidence,” Newman said.
Bobby turned those blue eyes in their gory mask to the sheriff. “Duke, you told me I did it. You told me I killed Uncle Ray.”
“I’m sorry, Bobby. I’m really sorry, but we found you covered in his blood, and you’re the only wereanimal in these parts.”
Bobby looked back at Newman. “Duke is right. If a wereanimal killed Uncle Ray, then it has to be me. There isn’t another shapeshifter for a hundred miles.”
“Let us worry about finding other suspects, Bobby. I just need to make sure you don’t do anything stupid while I’m out there trying to prove you’re innocent.”
“Now, Win,” Leduc said, “don’t get the boy’s hopes up like that.”
I debated on whether to remark on the blood evidence now, but I wanted to tell Newman in private first. He’d known the blood wasn’t right, but he didn’t have my field experience to say exactly why it was wrong. This was his warrant, his case, and, almost more important, his hometown, his friends. I didn’t want to undercut his authority here. I wanted to know only one thing: Had they photographed the blood patterns on the prisoner? I wasn’t besmirching Leduc and his people’s police work, but when you know a warrant of execution has been issued, sometimes even the best officers don’t collect evidence like they would in a regular murder case. I mean, what’s the point? There’s never going to be a trial.
“I don’t mean to get your hopes up, Bobby, but I believe there’s a chance you didn’t do this. That’s why I called in a more experienced marshal to look over your case.”
“It’s commendable that you want to be sure, Win, but you wasted Marshal Blake’s time getting her up here,” Leduc said.