Skin Trade (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter 17)

Chapter 12

THE CRIME SCENE was a huge warehouse. It was mostly empty, echoing space. Or it would have been if there weren't cops of every flavor, emergency personnel, and forensics all over the place. It was less full than it had been a few hours ago, but still damn busy for a crime scene from the night before last. But, of course, the dead were their own people. Everyone would want a piece of it. Everyone would want to help, or feel like they were helping. People hate to feel useless; cops get that squared. Nothing drives the police more nuts than not being able to fix something, like the ultimate guy attitude. I don't mean guy in a sexist way, either; it's a cop thing. People would linger looking for clues, or trying to make sense of it.

There might be clues, but there wouldn't be any sense to it. Vittorio was a serial killer who had enough vampire powers to make his less powerful vamps help him get his kicks. A serial killer who could share his pathology with others, not by persuasion but just by metaphysical force. Anyone who he turned into a vampire could be forced to join his hobby and share in his perversion.

I stared at all the markers where bodies had lain. Shaw had said they'd lost three, but that was just a number, a word. Standing there looking at the markers where the bodies had lain, where the blood had spilled, brought it home more. There were a lot of other markers, marking where things had fallen. I wondered what things. Weapons, spent shells, clothing-anything and everything would be marked, photographed, videotaped.

The floor looked like a minefield-so many things marked that there was almost no way to walk through it all. What the hell had happened here?

"Firefight," Edward said, voice low.

I looked at him. "What?"

"Firefight, spent shells, weapons emptied and thrown down. A hell of a fight."

"If those markers are spent shells, then why aren't there dead vampires? You don't empty this much brass into a space this open and not hit something, esepcially not with the training these guys had."

"Even the vampire hunter was ex-military," Bernardo said.

"How do you know that?" I asked.

He smiled. "Deputy Lorenzo likes to talk."

I gave him an approving look. "You weren't just flirting, you were gathering intelligence. And here I just thought you were hound-dogging it."

"I like to think of it as multitasking," he said. "I got information and she was cute."

Olaf began to walk out through all the little markers and signs that forensics had left behind. He moved gracefully, almost daintily through it all. He looked somehow unreal, moving that large body through the evidence markers. I wouldn't have been able to do it without moving things out of place, but Olaf seemed to glide. I spent most of my time around shapeshifters and vampires, both of which could define the term graceful, but it was still impressive, and unsettling, to watch the big man move through the evidence.

I'd have rather seen the actual evidence and the actual bodies, but I understood not being able to leave the bodies in the heat. I also understood not being able to leave weapons lying around, and you had to take the ammo and casings for evidence in case there was a trial.

"They always gather the evidence as if there's going to be a trial," Edward said, as if he'd read my mind.

"Yeah," I said, "but vampires don't get trials."

"No," Edward said, "they get us." He was gazing out over the crime scene as if he could visualize what had been taken away. I couldn't yet. The pictures and video would help me more than this empty space. Then I'd be able to see it, but here was just things removed, and the smell of death getting stronger in the Vegas heat.

They'd taken the bodies away but not yet cleaned up the blood and other fluids, so the smell of death was still there.

I'd been ignoring it as best I could, but once the front of my head thought about it, I couldn't ignore it. One of the real downsides to having as much lycanthropy running through my veins as I do is that my sense of smell can suddenly go into overdrive. You don't want that happening at a murder scene.

The smell of dried blood, decaying blood, was thick on my tongue. Once I smelled it, I had to see it. The blood had to have been there the whole time, but it was as if some filter had been stripped from my eyes. The floor of the warehouse was dark with blood. Pools of it everywhere. No matter how much blood you see in a movie or on television, it's never enough. There is so much blood in the human body, and the floor was so thick with it, it looked like some sort of black lake frozen there on the concrete floor.

They'd given us little booties to put over our shoes, and I knew now that it wasn't just the standard reason. Without them, we'd have been tracking the blood of Vegas's finest all over.

"They didn't feed on them," Bernardo said.

"No," I said, "they just bled them out."

"Maybe some of the blood belongs to vampires. They could have taken their dead," Edward said.

"In St. Louis he left his people behind as bait, and a trap. He left them to live, or die, and didn't seem to give a damn which. I don't think he's the kind of man to take his dead, if he doesn't protect his living."

"What if these dead would have given something away?" Edward said.

"What do you mean?"

"If he wouldn't take his dead because it was the decent thing to do, maybe he would take them if it was the smart thing to do."

I thought about that, then shrugged. "What could dead vampires tell us that we don't already know?"

"I don't know," Edward said, "it's just a thought."

"How did they ambush a SWAT team?" Bernardo asked.

"Did the dead vampire hunter have ability with the dead?" I asked.

"You mean, was he an animator like you?" Bernardo asked.

I nodded. "Yeah."

"No, he was ex-military, but he didn't raise the dead."

"That means they went in without anyone who could sense vampires," I said. Then I had to add, "I know they had a practitioner with them, who was among the dead, but being psychic doesn't mean you do well with the dead."

"There aren't that many of us who have a talent for the dead like you do, Anita," Edward said.

I studied his face, but he was looking out over the crime scene, or maybe he was watching Olaf kneeling so carefully among the carnage.

"I always wonder how you guys stay alive if you can't sense the vamps."

He smiled at me. "I'm good."

"You have to be better than me, if you don't have my abilities and you stay alive."

"Does that make me better than you, too?" Bernardo asked.

"No," I said, and made it sound final.

"Why is Ted better than you, but I'm not?"

"Because he's proven himself to me, and you're still just a pretty face."

"I got damn near killed the last time we played together."

"Didn't we all," I said.

Bernardo frowned at me. The look was enough to let me know that it really did bug him that I didn't think he was as good as Edward.

"How about Otto? Is he better than you?"

"I don't know."

"Is he better than Ted?"

"I hope not," I said, softly.

"Why say it that way, you hope not?"

I don't know what made me say the truth to Bernardo; Edward, yes, but the other man hadn't earned that kind of honesty from me yet. "Because if I'm not good enough to kill Otto, it'll be up to Edward to finish it."

Bernardo moved closer to me, studied my face hard. He spoke low. "Are you planning on killing him?"

"When he comes for me, yes."

"Why is he going to come for you?"

"Because someday I'll disappoint him. Someday I won't be able to keep being his little serial killer pinup, and when he thinks I'm less fun alive than I would be dead, he'll try for me."

"You don't know that," Bernardo said.

I looked out at the lake of dried blood and the big, graceful man moving through it. "Yeah, I do know that."

"She's right," Edward said, softly.

"So, the two of you are planning to kill him, but you'll work with him until he crosses the line." He spoke very low, almost a whisper.

"Yeah," I said.

"Yes," Edward said.

Bernardo looked from one to the other of us. He shook his head. "You know, sometimes the big guy doesn't scare me as much as the two of you."

"Only because you're not a petite brunette woman. Trust me, Bernardo, if you fit his vic profile, you'd have a whole new level of creep about the big guy."

He opened his mouth, as if to argue, then closed it. He finally nodded. "All right, I'll give you that. But unless you're going to kill him today, let's get to work." He walked away from us, but not toward Olaf. He wouldn't help us contemplate killing Olaf, but he wouldn't exactly stop us, either.

I wasn't sure where Bernardo fell on the good guy/bad guy scale. Sometimes I wasn't sure Bernardo knew, either.