in.
“What the hell happened to him?” I asked it out loud before I was sure I wanted to.
“The few wounds I’ve been able to isolate so far seem to have some of the same edges as the earlier wounds. It’s the same kind of weapon, maybe the same weapons; I’ll need more tests to be sure.”
“But this is different”-I gestured at the body-“this is… He’s been butchered.”
“No, not butchered; there was no intent to take meat for eating,” Olaf said.
I looked up at him. “Meat?” I said.
“You said he was butchered, but that was not accurate; the meat is ruined this way.”
“It’s a figure of speech, Otto,” I said, and again didn’t know how to interact with him.
He was looking at the body, and this time he couldn’t hide everything from the doctor. He was enjoying seeing this corpse.
I looked at Memphis and tried to think about something other than Olaf. “This looks almost mechanical,” I said. “There’s too much for one human being, isn’t there?”
“No,” Olaf answered. “A human could do all this damage if some of it were postmortem. I’ve seen people cut at corpses, but this is”-he leaned over the body, closer to the wounds-“different from that.”
“Different how?” I asked; maybe if I just kept asking questions, he’d answer and not be as creepy.
He traced his finger across some of the wounds on the chest. Anyone else around a body would have motioned above the skin, but he touched the body. Of course he did.
“The first body, the wounds are deliberate, spaced. This is frenzy. The wounds crisscross each other. The first one looks almost like a knife fight; most of the wounds are not killing wounds, as if the killer was playing with him, making him last. These wounds are deep from the beginning, as if the killer meant to finish it quickly.” He looked at Memphis. “Did anyone interrupt the scene? Any civilians found among the dead?”
“You think the killer heard something and stopped playing, to just kill?” Memphis asked.
“A thought,” Olaf said.
“No, no civilians, just the police and our local vampire hunter.”
“Is the last body cut up like this one?” Olaf asked.
I’d have thought of it eventually, but I was having trouble being a good investigator around Olaf. My creep factor was getting in the way of my thinking.
“One other member of SWAT is cut up like this. Only the body you’ve already seen and the vampire hunter are cut, as you put it, like they were played with, or offered a knife fight.”
“Do they have wounds on their hands and arms, like they were armed with a knife and fought back?” I asked.
Olaf asked, “How do you know about wounds like that?”
“When you fight with knives, you still use your arms like shields; it’s like defensive wounds, but it looks different. It’s hard to explain, but you know it after a while.”
“Because you’ve had the same kind of wounds?” he asked. His voice had the faintest edge of eagerness to it. I almost hated to answer the question, but… “Yes.”
“Did you see wounds like that on the arms of the other men?” Olaf asked.
I thought back, pictured them. “No.”
“Because they were not there.”
“So no knife fight,” I said.
“Or whatever they were fighting was so much faster than they were, they were not able to use their skills to help themselves.”
I looked up at Olaf. “It was daylight, and there were uncovered windows in the warehouse. It couldn’t have been vampires.”
He gave me a look. “You of all people know that there are more than just vampires that are faster than humans.”
“Oh, okay, you mean wereanimals.”
“Yes,” he said.
I looked at Memphis. “Were any of the more frenzied attacks made with things other than blades? I mean, did you find evidence of claws or teeth?”
“Yes,” he said, “and the fact that you figured that out makes me glad you got invited here. These are our men, do you understand?”
“You wanted to solve it without help from a bunch of strangers,” I said.
“Yes, we owed them.”
“I understand,” Olaf said. He was ex-military, so he probably did.
“But you know the monsters better than regular police. I thought that the Marshal Service having a preternatural branch was just some politically expedient way to give a bunch of killers a badge. But you guys really do know the monsters.”
I glanced at Olaf, but he was still looking at the body. I answered the doc, “We know monsters, doc, it’s what we do.”
“I stopped processing the last body when I found what I thought was lycanthrope damage. I wanted to wait for the preternatural experts, which I guess is you.”
“So they tell us,” I said.
The door to the autopsy suite swung open, and three new gowned and gloved people entered the room, wheeling another gurney and a new plastic-wrapped figure. This plastic was looser, as if it had been hastily thrown back over the body. Memphis stripped off his gloves and started to put on new ones. New body, new gloves; clean up, move down. I threw my gloves after the doctor’s. Olaf followed at my heels, like a game of follow the leader. Olaf loomed behind me, a little too close. I hurried to catch up with Memphis and the new arrivals. Three strangers and a corpse, and I was eager to meet them. Anyone was a step up from Olaf at this point.
16
I EXPECTED EDWARD and Bernardo to trail after the body, but they didn’t. I wondered if Edward had gotten the call about the warrants. The three strangers were already suited up and ready to go. Memphis introduced one as Dale and the other as Patricia. Dale had glasses behind his faceplate and short, brown hair. Apparently, he wanted to be extra careful. Patricia wore just the protective glasses. She was taller than me and had her hair in tight, dark pigtails. You didn’t see many grown women who wore pigtails. She was a little tall for Olaf’s preference, but the hair was right. I’d have rather had all men, or at least a blonde. But I couldn’t figure out how to ask without giving away the fact that we had a serial killer in our midst and it wasn’t the bad guy we were chasing. Of course, maybe I should stop worrying about other women and just watch my own ass for a change. No, because I knew what Olaf was, and if he hurt someone, I would feel responsible. Stupid, or just true?
The last man in the room had a camera in his gloved hands.
Memphis said, “This is Rose.”
“Rose?” Olaf made it a question.
“It’s short for something worse,” Rose said, and that was all he said. I wondered what could be worse, for a guy, than
The first thing my eyes saw was darkness. The body was dressed in the same dark green SWAT gear that Grimes and his men had been wearing. The blood had soaked into the cloth and turned most of it black, so the body was a dark shape on the tan plastic gurney. His face was a pale blur where they’d removed his helmet, but his hair was as dark as the uniform. His eyebrows were thick and dark, too. But below the eyebrows, the face was destroyed, gone, in a red ruin that my eyes didn’t want to make sense of.
