Skin Trade

by Hamilton, Laurell K.

  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.

  14

  OLAF USED HIS new uber-cell phone to search online for the nearest university or college that might have what we needed. University of Texas at Austin was the winner, with both Persian and Iranian studies and a minor available in Near Eastern mythology. Other universities and colleges had the first two but not the third. He left a message with the Near East Studies Department as we pulled into the parking lot of the Las Vegas/Clark County Coroner’s Office.

  The building was nondescript, set in the middle of an industrial area, but there was a discreet sign that let us know we were in the right place. There was also a little herd of white cars and trucks against the far side of the lot that had Clark County Coroner on the side of them. We got out, and Edward led us to a small door beside a larger garage door. He pushed a button to ring the bell.

  “I take it you’ve been here before,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  I spoke low. “Was it Edward or Ted who came to town?”

  He gave me that smile that said he knew things I didn’t. “Both,” he said.

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “Are you saying you’ve come as a marshal and an assa . . .”

  The door opened, and questions had to wait. Bernardo leaned forward and whispered in my ear, “He never answers questions for anyone but you.”

  I threw back over my shoulder, as we followed Edward into a double-doored entryway, “Jealous?”

  Bernardo scowled at me. No, I shouldn’t have taunted him, but I was nervous, and baiting him was more fun than what we were about to do.

  On television there are drawers. In real life there aren’t, or not at any morgue I frequent. I’m sure that somewhere there must be drawers, but have you ever noticed on some television shows that the drawers are so high up, you’d have to get a ladder to reach the bodies? What’s up with that?

  Olaf and I were in the little backward gowns, with two layers of gloves on his and the pathologist’s hands: one pair latex, and one pair of the blue nitrile. The double layer had become standard at most morgues, to protect against blood-borne pathogens. Thanks to Jean-Claude’s vampire marks, I probably couldn’t catch anything, even bare-handed, so I’d opted for a single layer of the nitrile. One, you sweated less; two, if I had to touch, or pick up anything, I was less clumsy in a single layer. I’d never been comfortable in gloves. I chose nitrile over latex because they were more puncture resistant.

  Morgues are almost never dark and gloomy, like they show on television. Clark County was no exception; it was bright and strangely cheerful. It smelled clean, with that undertone of disinfectant and something else. I was never sure what the something else was, but it never made me want to breathe deeper. I suspected that the “smell” was actually imaginary, and not there at all. Morgues actually don’t smell of much of anything. Clark County had a second cooler for bodies that would have made the morgue smell of something else. I really appreciated that.

  Olaf and I were in the first autopsy suite, which was all red countertops, shiny silver sinks, and walls that were tan and red tile. The color scheme looked like someone’s cheerful kitchen. Except that most kitchens don’t have bodies in plastic wrap on a gurney near the sink and countertops. I couldn’t get the kitchen analogy out of my head, so the body didn’t look ghostly behind the layers of plastic wrap but oddly like something you’d take out of the refrigerator.

  Once the bodies had bothered me, but that was a while ago. What bothers me about morgues now is thinking of the handful of vampires that were awake while I had to stake them. Awake and chained down to a gurney. The ones who just spit at me or tried to bite me to the bitter end don’t bother me. It’s the ones who cried. The ones who begged for their lives. Those haunt.

  Morgues make me think of tears now, and not my own. Clark County had a small room off to the side of the garage that was just for vampire stakings. It was next door to the room that they reserved for organ harvesting. They were nearly identical rooms, just that one helped people live, and the other helped them die. Oh, there wer
e chains and holy items in the vampire room, that was different. But, thankfully, I wasn’t having to use that room today.

  Dr. T. Memphis—honest, that was on his name tag—stood over the first body. Memphis was five foot six and a little round around the middle, so that his white coat wasn’t happily buttoned, but he’d buttoned it all the way up. He wore his white coat, tie, and collar tight. It must have been hell in the desert heat, but then he spent most of his time in cooler places. His curly hair was beginning to give up the fight to cover all of his head, and gray was winning out over the brown he’d started with. Small, round glasses completed the look.

  He looked harmless, and professional, until you looked in his eyes. His eyes were cool and gray and pissed. Angry did not cover it; he was pissed, and didn’t care that we saw it.

  Of course, I didn’t have to get to his eyes to know that he was not happy with us. Everything he did was jerky with anger. He snapped his gloves on. He banged the side of the gurney. He jerked the plastic off the corpse’s face, but only the face. He made sure the rest stayed covered.

  Olaf watched everything impassively, as if the man meant nothing to him. Maybe that was the truth. Maybe Olaf spent his life waiting for someone to interest him, and until then, people just didn’t. Was it peaceful inside Olaf’s head or lonely? Or, maybe just silent.

  Edward and Bernardo were looking at the only body they hadn’t had time to finish processing. It was in a different room, so it was just Olaf and me with Dr. Memphis. They’d gotten a female doctor, whose name I hadn’t caught. I trusted Edward to find out anything I needed to know, and Bernardo to know everything about the attractive woman from just a few minutes’ acquaintance. Either way, we were covered.

  I had not chosen to start with the processed bodies; Edward had done the division of labor. He’d tried to separate Olaf and himself into one team, and Bernardo and me into another, but Olaf had put his oversized foot down. The best Edward could do was to give me the bodies he thought would be less interesting to the big guy.

  Eventually, we’d have to see the other bodies, but we could delay the part that Edward and I both thought would get Olaf’s rocks off the most. Sometimes the best you can do is delay the worst part, for just a little bit.

  The man nestled in the plastic had short brunet hair. His complexion was gray with the edges dark, like someone who had a tan but had been bled pale. Just from seeing his face and neck, I knew he’d bled to death, or bled out, before he died. The official cause of death might read something else, but he’d been alive long enough to lose all or most of his blood.

  “Is the official cause of death exsanguination?” I asked.

  Dr. Memphis looked at me; it was a little less hostile. “This one was; why do you ask?”

  “I’m a vampire hunter; I see a lot of bloodless corpses.”

  “You said this one was. Are there other causes of death on the other men?” Olaf said.

  He looked up at the bigger man, and again it wasn’t as friendly. Maybe he just didn’t like men who were over a foot taller than himself. Short person’s disease: attitude.

  “See for yourself,” Memphis said, and he peeled back the plastic farther to expose the man to his waist.

  I knew how he’d bled out—cuts. So many cuts. I knew blade work when I saw it. But so many wounds, like angry mouths everywhere, lipless but gaping wide to show the pale meat underneath.

  “It was a blade of some kind.”

  Olaf nodded and reached out toward the wounds with his gloved hands. I stopped him, just short of touching the body, with my own gloved hand on his arm. Olaf glared at me, his deep-set eyes going back to that first blush of hostility he’d had before he started “liking” me.

  “Ask first,” I said, “we’re in the doctor’s house, not ours.”

  He continued to scowl at me, and then his face changed—not softened, just changed. He put his other hand over mine, so that he pressed my hand to his arm. It was my turn not to freak. But it sped my pulse, and not from the usual reason a man’s touch will speed your heart rate. Fear put my pulse in my throat as if I were choking on candy. I fought not to show my fear in any other way. Not for Olaf’s benefit, but so the doc didn’t figure out something was weird.

  My voice was even as I asked the doctor, “Is it okay if we touch the body?”

  “I’ve gathered all the evidence I can from this . . . body, so yes.”

  He’d hesitated on the word body, not something that most pathologists have problems saying. Then I realized I’d been slow. He knew the men, or at least some of them. The odds were that he’d had to work on people he knew over the last few hours. Hard.

  I tried to lift my hand from Olaf’s arm, but he kept his pressed over mine, holding me in place. For a second I thought it would be a fight, but then he moved his hand away.

  I fought not to step away from him. I fought with almost everything I had not to run screaming. Seeing the corpse cut up like this was romantic to Olaf. Motherfucking shit.

  He whispered, “You look pale, Anita.”

  I licked my dry lips and said the only thing I could think of. “Don’t touch me again.”

  “You touched me first.”

  “You’re right, my mistake. It won’t happen again.”

  He whispered again, leaning over me, “I hope it does.”

  That was it; I stepped away. He made me flinch first; not many people can say that, but I just couldn’t stand there beside the cut-up corpse of this man, this police officer, and know that Olaf thought my touching him over the dead body was foreplay. Oh my God, I could not work with this man. I just couldn’t, could I?

  “Is there a problem?” Dr. Memphis asked, looking curiously from one to the other of us. He wasn’t angry anymore, he was interested. I wasn’t sure that was an improvement.

  “No problem,” I said.

  “No problem,” Olaf said.

  We went back to looking at the corpse, and the fact that I was less bothered staring at the butchered man than at Olaf’s living eyes said volumes about both Olaf and me. I wasn’t sure what it said, but something. Something frightening.

  15

  I’D EXPECTED OLAF to be heavy-handed with the corpse, now that he had a green light, but he wasn’t. He explored the wounds with his fingertips, delicately, as if he were afraid of waking the man or hurting him. At first I thought he had some respect for the dead. Maybe it was the whole military/police thing. You respect your dead. Then I realized that wasn’t it at all.

  It was when he was on his third wound, and did the exact same pattern again, that I got a clue. He started by tracing the very edge of the wound with his fingertips; then the next time around the wound, he plunged his fingers a little deeper but was still strangely gentle. The next time around he shoved two fingers into the meat of the wound. It wasn’t as smooth a motion, as if he were finding bits that stopped the smoothness of his progress, but he circled the wound again.

  He finally plunged those two fingers far enough into the wound that it made a little squelchy sound. When he did that, he closed his eyes as if to listen, as if that sound could tell him something. But I was pretty certain that wasn’t it. He wanted to savor the sound. The way you close your eyes for a favorite piece of music. Close your eyes so that your sight doesn’t steal away some of your hearing.

  When he reached for a fourth wound, I started to say something, but Memphis beat me to it. “Is there a purpose to what you’re doing, Marshal Jeffries?” His tone said plainly that he doubted it.

  “Each wound that I have explored was made by a different blade. Two of the wounds were made with something that had a pronounced curve to it. The first wound was a more standard blade shape.”

  Memphis and I both looked at Olaf, as if he’d spoken in tongues. I think neither of us had expected anything useful from the corpse fondling. Damn.

  “That is exactly right,” Memphis said. The doctor stared up at the big man and finally shook his head. “You were able to tell all that with
just your fingers along the wounds?”

  “Yes,” Olaf said.

  “I would have said that was impossible, to tell all that from what you just did, but you are right. Maybe you can help us catch this . . . bastard.” I wondered what he’d planned on saying before he picked bastard, or was he just one of those people who didn’t cuss much and needed practice? I’d be happy to help him practice.

  “I know blade work,” Olaf said, in his usual empty voice, though when your voice is that deep, empty has a growl to it.

  “Do you need to see the whole show?” Memphis asked.

  “The whole show?” Olaf made it a question.

  I said, “He means, do we need to see the rest of the body uncovered?”

  Olaf just nodded, wordlessly, face impassive.

  I wasn’t sure we needed to see the damage below the waist, but I couldn’t refuse. What if I went all wussy on them and didn’t look, but there was some vital clue on the body? Some metaphysical thing that Olaf wouldn’t see, or the doc, but I’d know what it was? Olaf knew blade work, more intimately than I ever would, hopefully. But I knew the metaphysics better. In a way, Edward, who did metaphysics pretty well for someone with no talent for it, and Bernardo, who was strictly a see-and-shoot-it guy, were a good team to look at the bodies, and oddly, so were Olaf and I. We each had skills the other lacked, and we could learn more together than apart; as disturbing as that was to admit in my head, it was true.

  The cuts continued down the body. I don’t know why damage to the sex organs is always so disturbing, but it is. There was nothing special about the damage there, just a cut that happened to cross his groin. It wasn’t mutilation for the sake of mutilating; it was just another cut. It still made me want to look away. Maybe it was all those taboos on nudity that I grew up with, but it seemed wrong to just stare. You’d think I’d get over that part, but I hadn’t yet. Sexual mutilation, even accidental, bothered me.

  Olaf reached toward the body, and for one awful moment I thought he was reaching there, but he went to a wound in the thigh. He didn’t lovingly explore it, like he had the others; he just shoved his fingers in, as if looking for something.