Skin Trade

55

WE STOOD IN front of a modest suburban house in a street full of other modest suburban houses. There were enough streetlights that we had a good view even in the dark. People forget that Las Vegas’s famous Strip with its casinos, shows, and bright lights is only a small part of the city. Other than the fact that the house was set in a yard that ran high to rocks, sand, and native desert plants, it could have been one of a million housing developments anywhere in the country.

Most of the other houses had grass and flowers, as if they were trying to pretend they didn’t live in the desert. The day’s heat was browning the grass and flowers nicely. They must have a limit on how much they can water, because I’ve seen yards in deserts as green as a golf course. These yards looked sad and tired in the cooling dark. It was still hot, but had the promise that as the night wore on it would get cooler.

“A high priestess lives here?” Bernardo said.

“According to the phone book,” I said.

He came around the car to stand on the sidewalk beside us. “It looks so… ordinary.”

“What did you expect, Halloween decorations in August?”

He had the grace to look embarrassed. “I guess I did.”

Edward walked to the back of the car and opened it. He reached into his own bag of tricks and got out one of the U.S. Marshal windbreakers.

“It’s too hot for that,” I said.

He looked at me. “We’re armed to the teeth, and it’s all visible. Would you let us in your house if you weren’t sure we were cops? But I am running low on them. Someone keeps getting them all bloody.”

“Sorry about that.”

I tapped my badge on its lanyard around my neck. It was what I wore in St. Louis when the heat was too hot for a jacket. “See?” I said. “I’m legal.”

“You look more harmless than we do,” Edward said, and started handing out jackets to the other men.

Bernardo took his without comment and just slipped it on, pulling his braid out of the back with a practiced flip. Some gestures are not about being a girl or a boy, but just how long your hair is.

Olaf had his badge on a lanyard around his neck, too. It bugged me that we’d both done it, but where else are you gonna put a badge when you’re wearing a T-shirt? I did have one of the clips and had put the badge on my backpack a couple of times, but I’d run into situations where I took off the backpack, and got separated from it and my badge. I had the badge on my belt by the Browning, because you always want to flash a badge when you flash a gun. Just good survival skills, and saves the other cops from being called by some panicked civilian who spotted it. You want your badge in the middle of a fight with police and bad guys. It helps the police not shoot you. Yeah, being a girl and looking so uncop helped the good guys know what I looked like, but accidents happen when you’re drowning in adrenaline. Badge visible, at least the accident wouldn’t be my fault.

Edward clipped his badge to his clothes so that he’d be doubly visible, and Bernardo followed suit. There were still moments when Edward could make me feel like the rookie. I wondered if there’d ever come a time when I truly believed we were equal. Probably not.

I wasn’t really a fan of desert landscaping, but someone with an eye for it had arranged the cacti, grass, and rocks so that everything flowed. It gave the illusion of water, dry water, flowing in the shape and color of stone and plant.

“Nice,” Bernardo said.

“What?” I asked.

“The garden, the patterns-nice.”

I looked up at him and had to give him a point for noticing.

“It’s just rocks and plants,” Olaf said.

I took a breath to say something, but Edward interrupted. “We’re not here to admire her gardening. We’re here to talk to her about a murdered parishioner of hers.”

“I don’t think they call them parishioners,” Bernardo said.

Edward gave him a look, and Bernardo spread his hands as if to say, Sorry. Why was Edward being so tense all of a sudden?

I took a step toward him, and suddenly I felt it, too. It was a faint hum up the skin, down the nerves. I looked around the door and finally found it on the porch. It was a mosaic pentagram in pretty colored stone, set in the concrete of the porch itself. It was charged, as in spell charged.

I touched Edward’s arm. “You might want to step off the welcome mat.”

He glanced at me, then where I was pointing. He didn’t argue, just stepped a little to one side. A visible tension lifted in the set of his shoulders. Maybe Edward only thought he couldn’t sense things. Being a little psychic would explain how he’d managed to stay alive all these years while hunting preternatural creepy-crawlies.

“I didn’t see it,” he said, “and I was looking.”

“I didn’t see it until you acted too tense,” I said.

“She’s good,” he said, as he rang the doorbell.

I nodded.

Olaf was looking at both of us, as if he didn’t know what the hell had just happened. Bernardo said, “A hex sign on the porch. Step around it.”

“It’s not a hex sign,” I had time to say before the door opened.

A tall man answered the door. His dark hair was shaved close, and his eyes were dark and not happy to see us. “What do you want?”

Edward slid instantly into Ted’s good-ol’-boy persona. You’d think I’d get used to how easily he became someone else, but it still creeped me.

“U.S. Marshal Ted Forrester; we called ahead to make sure Ms. Billings would be home. Or, rather, Marshal Anita Blake called ahead.” He grinned as he said it and just exuded charm. Not that slimy charm that some men do, but that hail-fellow-well-met kind of energy. I knew some people who did it naturally, but Edward was the first person I’d known who could turn it on and off like a switch. It always made me wonder if long before the army got hold of him, he’d been more like Ted. Which sounded weird, since Ted was him, but the question still seemed worth poking at.

The man glanced at Edward’s ID, then looked past him at us. “Who are they?”

I held up my badge on its lanyard so it was even more visible. “Marshal Anita Blake; I did call and talk to Ms. Billings.”

Bernardo said, in a voice as cheerful and well meaning as Ted’s, “U.S. Marshal Bernardo Spotted Horse.”

Olaf sort of growled behind us all. “Otto Jeffries, U.S. Marshal.” He held up his badge so the man could see it over everyone’s shoulders. Bernardo did the same.

A woman’s voice called from deeper in the house, “Michael, let them in.”

The man, Michael presumably, scowled at us but unlatched the screen door. But before he let us cross the threshold, he spoke in a low voice. “Don’t upset her.”

“We’ll do our best not to, sir,” Edward said in his Ted voice. We went in through the door, but there was something about Michael at my back that made me turn so I could keep him in my peripheral vision. With everyone inside, I could put him at a little over six feet, which put him taller than Bernardo but shorter than Olaf. I had a moment as we all bunched into the foyer to see just how much smaller Edward was than the other men. It was always hard to remember that Edward wasn’t that tall, at five foot eight. He was just one of those people who seemed taller than he was; sometimes physical height isn’t what tall is about.

The living room was probably as big a disappointment to Bernardo as the outside had been because it was a typical room. It had a couch and a couple of chairs and was painted in a light and cheerful blue, with hints of a pinkish orange in the cushions and some of the knickknacks. There was tea set out on the long coffee table, with enough cups for everyone. I hadn’t told her how many of us were coming, but there they sat, four cups. Psychics, ya gotta love ’em.

Phoebe Billings sat there, her eyes a little red from crying, but her smile serene and sort of knowing. My