Skin Trade (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter 17)

Chapter 13

TWO HOURS LATER we'd learned all the warehouse could tell us. There were crates that had been used as coffins. They'd been shot to hell by the M4s that the team had carried. If the vampires had been in the crates at the time it would have been a kill, but there was no blood on the inside of any of the crates.

Olaf had padded back to us, soundless, somehow, in his black boots. "I thought it was an explosion, but it wasn't. It's almost as if there was something here that could bleed and incapacitate, but not kill right away. But whatever did this left no trace on the ground. There are no footprints at the center of the blood pool except for the boot tracks of the police."

"How can you tell that it was designed to bleed and incapacitate, but not kill?" I asked.

He'd given me that arrogant look out of his deep, caveman eyes. It was the old Olaf peering out, the one who'd thought that no woman could be good at this kind of work. Hell, women to him weren't good at anything.

"That look makes me not want to admit this, but I want to solve this more than I want to be cool."

"What look?" he asked.

"The look that says I'm a woman, and that makes me stupid."

He looked away, then said, "I do not think you are stupid."

I felt my eyebrows go up. Edward and I exchanged a look. "Thanks, Otto," I said, "but pretend I can't look at a concrete floor and track the events of a crime on it, and just explain... Please." I added the please, because we were both trying to be nicer to each other. I could play nice.

"The blood pattern, the markers on the floor. The pictures and video will confirm it, but this was a trap, not with a bomb or human soldiers but with something that could"-he made a waffling motion with one hand-"hover, but still attack. I saw something similar to this once before."

He had everyone's attention now. "Tell us," Edward said.

"I was on a job in the Sandbox."

"Sandbox?" I made it a question.

"Middle East," Edward answered.

"Yes, it was a group of terrorists. They had a sorcerer," Olaf said, then looked way too thoughtful for comfort.

"Don't say the T-word," Bernardo said, "or they'll bring in Homeland or the Feds, and it will get out of our hands."

"When I do my report, I will have to say what I have seen," Olaf said. The flirting was gone; he was all business. He was colder, more self-contained this way, and once I'd thought scary. Now that I had his version of flirting to compare it to, the business side of him was by far my favorite.

"When you say sorcerer, are you using it the way we do in the States?" I asked.

"I do not know."

"Sorcerer means someone who gets their magic from dealing with demons and evils here," Edward said.

He shook his head. "No, a sorcerer is just someone who uses their powers to harm and never to do good. We did not have a practitioner, as they say here, with us. So I cannot speak knowledgeably about the magic, other than the damage it caused."

"How similar to this was it?" I asked.

"I need to see the bodies before I can be sure, but the blood pattern doesn't look the same. The bodies in"-he stopped as if he wasn't allowed to say the place name-"where I was were substantially different. The bodies there were torn apart, as if by some unseen force that left no tracks and no physical evidence other than its victims."

"I've never heard of Middle Eastern terrorists being willing to work with magic. They tend to kill any witches they find," Bernardo said.

"They were not Islamic," Olaf said. "They wanted to send their country back to a much older time. They thought of themselves first and foremost as Persian. They felt that Islam had weakened them as a people, so they used older powers that the Muslims with us thought unclean and evil."

"Wait," Bernardo said, "you were working with the locals?"

"You do a lot of that," Edward said.

I glanced at him and couldn't read past the blank face, but he'd admitted he had worked in the Middle East. That was news to me, though not a surprise.

"The men working with us would have gladly killed us a week before, but we were all in danger."

"The enemy of my enemy is my friend," Bernardo said.

We all nodded.

"So this may be some kind of Persian bogey beast, not a demon but something similar."

"As I said, we had no practitioners with us, so I can only say the damage seems similar, but not the same."

"Okay, we'll see if we can find anyone in town who knows more than I do about pre-Islamic Persian magic." I looked at Edward. "Unless you know more than I do, which is nothing."

He shook his head. "Nothing."

"Don't look at me," Bernardo said.

I bit back the first reply, which was, We weren't. It would have been mean and not entirely true. He'd found out information from the deputy for us. "Okay, we'll see if there's anyone in town who knows more than we do, or even at some university. There's an expert out there somewhere."

"Academics aren't always good with real-world information," Edward said.

"Right now, we have zero to go on, which means any info is better than where we are." I shrugged. "It doesn't hurt to ask."

The homicide detectives called Marshal Ted Forrester over to talk. Edward went, turning to the more open face of his alter ego. I knew that his "Ted" face actually hid more. It was interesting that none of the rest of us was invited to talk to the detectives.

I turned back to Olaf and Bernardo. "Okay, we'll check into the Persian angle later, but right now I have another question. Why would they kill them in such a way as to destroy the chance to feed on their blood?"

"Maybe their master didn't like the taste of men," Olaf said.

"What?" I asked.

"Their master's victim of preference is strippers, mostly female, correct?" Olaf said.

"Yeah."

He leaned in and whispered so that only I and Bernardo could hear. "I have simply killed men, cleanly, so that I could take my time with the women. Maybe it is the same for this master vampire. He takes no pleasure from feeding on men."

"He killed a male stripper in St. Louis," I said.

"But was he like these men, trained, a soldier?"

I pictured the body in my mind, and because it had been the only male victim, I could see him fairly clearly. "He was tall, but thin, not that muscular, more... effeminate, I guess."

"He likes his victims to be soft; the men killed here were not soft."

"Okay," Bernardo said, "didn't it just creep you out that he talked about killing men so he could take his time with the women? Am I the only one who found that disturbing?"

I looked at Olaf, and we had a moment of a look between us, then we both looked at Bernardo. I said, "I know what Otto is and what he does. Frankly, comments like he just made are one of the few reasons I'm glad he's here. I mean, you have to admit he's got a unique insight into the whole serial killer mentality."

"And you're calm about it?" Bernardo asked.

I shrugged and looked back at Olaf, who looked at me, so calm he looked bored. "We're doing our jobs."

Bernardo shook his head. "You are both weird as hell, you do know that, right?"

"You know, you might want to keep your voice down, Bernardo," Edward said. He was back from talking to the detectives and Sheriff Shaw, who had finally joined us. They were still ignoring the rest of us. Somehow I wasn't hurt that Shaw didn't want to talk to me.

"Sorry," Bernardo said.

"They're going to give us access to the forensics: pictures, video, the stuff they bagged and labeled."

"I might learn more from the photos and film," Olaf said.

"They're hoping we all will," Edward said.

"Just let me see the pictures and video," I said.

"I just want something to shoot," Bernardo said.

"You know, life must be simpler for you," I said.

Bernardo gave me a dirty look. "You're just cranky because we've been here for hours and we don't know anything that will help us find this bastard."

"We know it is similar to the Persian sorcerer I met in the Sandbox," Olaf said.

"I know it would be weird, and too coincidental for real life, but could it be the same sorcerer with a slightly different spell, or whatever?" I asked.

"Not possible," Olaf said.

"Why not?" I asked.

"The sorcerer was not bulletproof."

"So he's dead," I said.

Olaf nodded.

"Well, if we can trace someone in this country who plays with Persian magic, then we need to find someone who went missing from his life."

"What do you mean?" Bernardo asked.

"Someone who knows this type of magic and has suddenly vanished. Someone from work, a wife or family member, whatever, someone who's been reported missing. Then we might be looking for someone who was recently made into a vampire," I asked.

"Why?" Olaf asked.

"Because if they'd had this kind of magic in St. Louis or New Orleans or Pittsburgh, they would have used it. This is a complete change in how they kill. If they didn't have missing strippers who fit the original MO, which is what got the warrant of execution revived, then I would say it was someone signing Vittorio's name to the note on the wall and the note that came to my office, but not him."

"It could still be two different crimes," Edward said.

"What do you mean?"

"Maybe Vittorio is killing strippers in Vegas, but that doesn't mean that our sorcerer and the people who killed these operators are actually Vittorio's vampires. They went in standard op for vampire hunts, during the day."

"I know that with SWAT technology they usually go in at night for human bad guys, but vampires are daylight hunts if possible," I said.

"They went in during the day, Anita. The hovering magic, or whatever, killed three of them, and either that sorcerer or something else put the rest in some sort of sleep."

"I've never heard of anything like that," I said.

"No one has," he said.

"But if it was daylight," Bernardo said, "who wrote the note in their blood? Who took the head and mailed it to you? It was daylight and there are windows in here that aren't covered. The only reason the cops are saying vampires is because Vittorio's name is signed, and this was an old lair of the vampires."

"Are you saying someone has framed Vittorio and his vamps for this?" I asked.

Bernardo shrugged. "Maybe."

"Fuck, I don't know whether to hope you're right or hope you're wrong. If you're right, then we have Vittorio to find before he kills another stripper, and some crazy sorcerer who's trying to blame vampires for this crime. Were there fang marks on the dead?"

"No one's said," Edward said.

"Don't tell me," Bernardo said. "We get to go to the morgue and look at the bodies?"

"Are you afraid?" Olaf asked.

Bernardo gave him an unfriendly look that didn't even faze the other man. "No, I'd just rather not go."

"You are afraid," Olaf said.

"Stop it," Edward said, "both of you. We'll go look at the bodies. Though, Otto, you could start calling around about the Persian angle. You are the only one of us who's seen something similar."

"No, I will go to the morgue with"-he looked at me-"Anita. But I will call the local university from the truck and see if they have the expert we need."

"We're all going to the coroner's," Edward said.

"Otto just wants to watch me poke around in the bodies," I said.

"No," Olaf said, "I want to help you do it."

In that instant I wanted to say that I'd just sit this one out. I'd just look at the pictures and the video and that would be good enough. I did not want to go to the morgue and look at the recently dead, especially with this much blood on the ground. It was going to be pretty gruesome, but more than that I did not want to have Olaf help me with the bodies. He'd enjoy it. But the bodies were part of the crime scene. They were full of clues. I had to see if I could find anything to help us catch whoever had done this. Whether it was Vittorio with a new sorcerer friend, or someone else, they needed to be stopped. How far was I willing to go to stop them? All the way to the morgue with our very own pet serial killer. Sometimes the things I do for my job worry me.