Crimson Death
Page 177

   “Are you all right, Anita?” Edward asked, because he’d seen me take that step back. I would never have backed up from Logan, not normally.
   “No, I don’t think I ate enough today. I appreciate everyone bringing me coffee when you have all the great tea, but I think I need real food.” I emphasized that last word a little, hoping he’d understand what I meant.
   “When you don’t think coffee is enough, something really is wrong with you, pardner.” He made a drawling joke of it, but he’d understood me. He’d seen me feed before.
   “We can have food brought in,” Pearson said.
   “I think I may need some air, too,” I said. I had to get away from Logan, who was still almost shaking with his anger. I resisted the urge to tell him he needed to learn to meditate or take a yoga class, just to see how angry I could make him. He’d make such a good snack.
   “I apologize for Inspector Logan,” Sheridan said.
   That was it for Logan. He backed up and marched out of the room without a word. I was pretty sure he didn’t trust himself, so leaving was his only option. When the door shut carefully behind him, Pearson said, “Don’t judge us by Logan.”
   “What’s his problem?” I asked, taking deep, even breaths.
   Pearson looked at Sheridan, and she looked embarrassed. “I made the mistake of dating a fellow officer, and when I broke it off—” She shook her head. “It was a grave misjudgment on my part.”
   “I’m going to go check on Logan. I think it was my misjudgment thinking the two of you could work a case together again.” Pearson left, closing the door behind him.
   “If you don’t meet people at work, where do you meet them?” I said. Now that Logan was gone, I could breathe a little easier.
   “Exactly,” she said, and then her pretty face looked very unhappy, “but it was still a mistake.”
   “Dating Logan? Oh yeah.”
   “He wasn’t always like this. I swear he wasn’t. I mean, he had a temper, but not like this.”
   “You don’t have to apologize for Logan,” Nolan said from the wall where he was still standing.
   “But I feel like I should, like it’s somehow my fault,” she said.
   “You don’t have to date a man just because he’s upset that you stopped dating him,” I said.
   “There are a lot of fish in the sea, Inspector; you need to fish a little farther out into the ocean, that’s all,” Edward said.
   “But all the good fish are taken,” she said, looking at him.
   “Not all of them,” I said.
   She looked at me then, and gave me wide eyes. “Well, you certainly have caught your limit.”
   “Or a little over,” I said.
   She smiled. “Well, let me know if you’re going to throw one of them back. I might want to be there with a net.”
   “I’ll keep that in mind,” I said, smiling.
   “I think Anita and her men in the hallway still need food,” Edward said.
   “We can have food brought in for everyone,” Sheridan said, “unless you think that eating and looking at the photos will be a problem?”
   I looked down at the torn throats, the mangled bodies, and then had another thought. “I let myself get distracted; are any of the skull, brain, head parts in the debris I’m seeing in the pictures?”
   “What do you mean, Blake?”
   “I mean, did they crush the head and mix it up with the other small bits, or did the killer take the heads?”
   “We haven’t found any brain matter at the crime scenes,” she said.
   “So whoever is killing them is taking souvenirs after all.”
   “Why wouldn’t they eat the head?” Sheridan asked.
   “It’s like all animal heads, not great eating raw, though I’m told that brains mixed with eggs make really fluffy scrambled eggs.”
   Sheridan made a face at me. “Have you eaten brains?”
   “No, but I went to college with a girl whose family owned a cow farm, and her mom mixed the brains into her scrambled eggs without telling the kids. They thought it was delicious and didn’t know, until they got out on their own and tried to make eggs like Mom did, and couldn’t get the fluffy, creamy texture.”
   Edward gave a low chuckle as Sheridan’s face paled. Nolan joined him in the chuckle and tried to turn it into a cough. Edward apologized. “I’m not laughing at you, Rachel. I’m laughing at Anita telling that story when we’re thinking about getting food.”
   “We’re going to be looking at crime scene photos while we eat. I didn’t think the egg story would be a problem.”
   He laughed again and patted my shoulder. “You just keep thinking there, Butch. That’s what you’re good at.”
   I rolled my eyes at him and wished I could remember a movie-line comeback, but nothing sprang to mind.
   Pearson stuck his head back in the room. “What does everyone want for lunch?”
   “Not eggs,” Sheridan said.
 
 
63

   THE SANDWICHES WEREN’T Irish; they were just food. When you’re ordering sandwiches that can be eaten while you look at paperwork and photos on a crowded table, a sandwich is a sandwich is a sandwich. It wasn’t a bad sandwich, but it wasn’t great, either. It really was just another work trip for me except that I was the only one who got a Coke to drink; even Edward got bottled water. He told me if I behaved myself today maybe the detectives would let us all eat in the big room with desks so we weren’t all having to share the little kids’ table.    “I don’t know what you mean by that, Ted,” Sheridan had said. Pearson apparently had decided to eat elsewhere, or was skipping lunch and holding Logan’s hand, or maybe beating the shit out of him. I really didn’t care which, as long as Logan was somewhere else. I knew I’d have to deal with him again, but later was better than now.
   “It’d be much more comfortable sharing this meal at your desk like we normally do,” he said with that Ted smile that seemed to melt women into their socks but had never worked on me, because I’d met him when he was being just Edward. His cold-blooded-killer mode was far less charming than good ol’ boy Ted.
   She actually got a little flustered, spilling bits of her sandwich on one of the photos. Thanks to modern technology, we could print more almost instantly, but still you tried not to get the evidence messy. While Sheridan grabbed for napkins I gave Edward a raised-eyebrow look. He smiled innocently back at me as if butter wouldn’t have melted in his mouth, then went to help her clean up, which made her start to drop things again. I didn’t know what game he was playing, only that he was playing one. I was so bad at being devious that I didn’t try, but he was really good at it. I just didn’t know why he was being devious in Inspector Rachel Sheridan’s direction. Maybe it amused him? I wouldn’t know unless he told me, and if I asked outright, he wouldn’t, so I just watched the show.