Crimson Death
Page 174

   Those were the pictures I looked at the longest, because it was rare for vamps to tear a body apart like this. Even as I was looking at them in pictures, my mind refused to “see” them for what they were at first. It was the mind’s way of protecting itself, of protecting us from seeing something so horrible that it would leave a psychic wound, almost literally. But it was part of my job to look at things that most people never had to see. I couldn’t afford to look away, because there was something wrong with the scene. Something just didn’t ring true for a vampire-related crime scene.
   I spread the pictures out on my part of the table and forced myself to try to make sense of them. I’d really started to want to listen to my brain when it said, Don’t look. We don’t need another nightmare in here, but I knew that if I flinched I might miss something, and part of me would always believe that something I missed would be the clue that would solve the case. Solving the case meant saving lives, so I looked down at the pictures. I wasn’t sure at first if it was one body or two. I saw one shoulder with an intact arm, but no hand. A hand with no arm, so probably a match. Even through all the blood, I could see that the fingers were thick and the hand big enough that I was pretty certain it was a man’s hand. The arm looked big enough that it helped me feel fairly confident that it was male. There was a lower half of a body near it that seemed intact and to match in size, so one dead male. I looked at the other bits in the blood, trying to make them into the missing parts of the upper body, but I couldn’t do it. I wasn’t sure if the parts were just so torn up that I couldn’t put them back together from just pictures, or if there were parts missing. If there were missing bits, then this wasn’t just vampires, because the one thing they couldn’t do was eat solid food. The man’s body was one of three that looked like they’d been torn apart. None of the bodies had a visible head in the mess, but there were enough pieces scattered that the head could have been crushed and scattered among all the other gory bits.
   “You seem fascinated, Marshal Blake,” Pearson said.
   I glanced up at him. “I’m trying to do the serial killer math, and I can’t get the body parts to match up. Did you find all the parts to the man’s body at the scene?”
   Pearson did a look with everyone in the room, including Edward and Inspector Luke Logan. Inspector Logan was medium height, dark, and average looking. He paced a lot, and the room wasn’t big enough for it. He’d joined our merry little band a couple of hours into it all. There was already a good-size table covered in pictures and reports, with chairs for five, and the board on its stand with the map. Plus the bags with Echo and Damian in them were tucked up beside my outside leg and the back of my chair. A sixth person would have been a tight fit for the room, but a sixth person who paced energetically and liked to talk with his hands . . . I was rapidly understanding why no one else liked him.
   “What was the look for?” Nolan asked from the other side of Edward, which put him at the end of the table. I guess I wasn’t the only one on the outside of that knowing look. It pissed me off that Edward was hiding things from me, but when didn’t he? He liked his secrets too damned much. He and I would talk about it later, in private.
   “I told you she’d spot it,” Edward said.
   “Spot what? Why is it important that Blake can’t find all the body parts?” Nolan asked. He looked at the pictures in front of me.
   “Can you find all the body parts in those pictures?” Edward asked, looking at Nolan.
   The Captain was quiet for a moment, watching everyone’s face. Only Logan had looked away, arms crossed over his chest, as if he were trying not to give anything away. Finally, Nolan said, “No, but you could have stray dogs, or crows that picked up some pieces.”
   “Do you see animal footprints in the blood?” Pearson asked.
   Nolan leaned over Edward farther, looking at the pictures. I pushed them closer toward him, but he finally shook his head. “No.”
   “We don’t rule out crows, or other birds flying in and grabbing some of the body before we found it, but there’s no bird native to the area that could carry off enough of the body to explain the missing pieces.”
   “What do you think happened to the missing body parts?” I asked.
   “I don’t know,” Nolan said.
   “I was actually addressing everyone in the room with the question, not just you, Nolan. You’re as late to this party as I am.”
   “We’d like to hear your theories first,” Sheridan said.
   “Why?”
   “Forrester had his theories, but I requested he not share them with you until you had your own opportunity to view the evidence yourself,” Pearson said.
   “Why withhold information from me?”
   “Because Ted here has been bragging about you for days, and we wanted to see if you’re as good as he said,” Logan said, his arm flung out from his body and half-pointed and half-flapped toward Edward.
   “That is not it,” Pearson said, frowning at Logan.
   Sheridan stepped away from the map to say, “Ted had some . . . interesting insights about this particular series of photos. We wanted to see if another vampire hunter would come to the same . . . insights.”
   They were all being so careful about their word choices; even Logan had been less obvious and that seemed like something he found difficult. I sighed and gave Edward a look. He gave me a steady look back. “I’d have told you, because I know you’ll see it.”
   I gathered the pictures back from Nolan and spread them out in front of me again. “Did you put these pictures in here to trip me up?” I asked.
   “What do you mean, trip you up?” Sheridan asked.
   “Trick me.”
   “No. I mean, no.” She looked puzzled enough that I believed her.
   “Are these photos from another case?” I asked.
   “Why would you ask that, Marshal?” Pearson said.
   “They don’t match. Not just this man, but any of the dismembered bodies.”
   “We only have three,” Sheridan said.
   I looked at her to see if she was kidding, but she looked totally serious. “Does Dublin get enough dismembered bodies that three new ones are no big deal?”
   “No, of course not,” she said.
   “It’s as rare a crime here as it is back in your city,” Pearson said.
   I looked at Nolan and Edward. The first looked puzzled, and the second inscrutable. No one kept a secret like him, no one alive anyway.
   “This doesn’t look like the work of a vampire,” I said.
   “We thought they were strong enough to do it,” Pearson said.