Sucker Punch (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter 27)

“He could have just sat down on the edge of the bed and lain back,” I said.

Newman shook his head. “If he used his hands to scoot backward, then the blood that covered his hands would have left more marks.”

“And if he crawled into bed, then the blood on his leg and feet would have marked the sheets more,” I said.

“Exactly.”

“Like you said earlier, the blood evidence is wrong.”

“I saw that, but it didn’t occur to me that those weren’t Bobby’s footprints. I should have realized that if part of the blood evidence was wrong, then it was all fucked.”

“Don’t beat yourself up, Newman. None of us sees everything all at once. That’s why in a normal murder case you have so much time to look over the evidence before trial.”

“But this isn’t a trial, Blake. It’s an execution.”

“Not yet it’s not,” I said.

“I don’t want to take Bobby’s life if he didn’t do this.”

“I don’t want anyone to take his life if he was framed for this murder.”

“People don’t frame other people outside of murder mysteries,” Newman said. “They blame other people, but they don’t actually frame specific people.”

“They do to throw suspicion off of themselves sometimes,” I said.

“Maybe in Agatha Christie mysteries,” he said.

“Are you on board with this being a frame or not?” I asked, looking at him.

“It just seems so elaborate. I mean, if they’d just killed Ray and then found Bobby with blood on him, that would have been enough.”

“Crime makes people stupid, and committing murder makes them insecure, so they have to overdo it, I guess.”

“But they had to know that footprints are as individual as fingerprints,” he said.

“I bet most people don’t know that, but maybe they were counting on you just pulling the trigger on Bobby and not overthinking it. Once he’s dead, then the case is over. The carpet gets cleaned or ripped out and replaced. The room where the murder happens gets deep-cleaned, and all the evidence, real or fake, just goes away.”

“Murders when I was just a uniform cop meant everything got bagged and tagged and saved for trial. It was worth your badge to mess up potential evidence. Now it’s like none of it matters except hunting down the killer and executing them.”

“By the time we’re called in, there are usually a lot of bodies in the morgue, Newman. Our job was designed because putting vampires and wereanimals in regular jail to await trial didn’t work, because they used supernatural powers to escape, usually causing the death of even more people on the way out the door.”

“I know that, Blake. It’s one of the reasons I wanted to become a marshal in the first place.” His words were okay, but the tone and his face weren’t.

“Sounds like you’re having second thoughts about your career change,” I said.

He looked surprised and just stared at me for a second. “It’s like now, this case. There’s only one person dead, so it’s an eye for an eye, but we both think that someone is using the system, using our job, to commit a second murder, because they know if we believe Bobby is guilty, he’s a dead man.”

“Yeah, there’s a lot of room for corruption and miscarriage of justice in the system,” I said.

He stared at me again. “You say that so matter-of-fact, as if it’s just business as normal.”

“It is, Newman.”

“How can that be okay?”

“I didn’t say it was okay. I said it was normal. A lot of what people take for normal is very not okay.”

“Then I don’t understand,” he said.