Skin Trade

by Hamilton, Laurell K.

  I shook my head. “Not necessarily, doc. You can police your brass, but not the little bits and pieces of your body. I saw the crime scene. It was a hell of a fight, and there was no time to clean up like that.”

  “Then what did the creature do? Did he wear a suit?” He touched his own suit.

  “I doubt it,” I said, “but a really powerful shapeshifter can do a partial shift.”

  “I know a manwolf or mancat form,” Memphis said.

  “No, I mean the really powerful ones can shapeshift just the hands into claws, and the feet. I saw a werewolf climb the side of a building like that.”

  “That was one of your cases?”

  “I don’t know what you mean by that, but I saw the bastard do it.”

  “He used claws to shove into the building?” Patricia asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Wow, shades of Spider-Man,” Rose said.

  “More Wolverine,” I said, “but the principle’s the same.”

  “He got away,” Memphis said.

  “Temporarily,” I said.

  “How did they catch him?” Patricia asked.

  “I got them to approve werewolves to track the rogue werewolf, then I killed him.”

  “What do you mean you killed him?” she asked.

  “I mean, I walked up to him and put a bullet between his baby blues.”

  Her mouth made a little soundless O. Rose said, “Just one bullet?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Back to the case; you can listen to war stories from the marshal after we’ve caught our man.”

  “Sorry, doctor,” Patricia said.

  “Sorry, doc.”

  “So you think we have a very powerful shapeshifter that did this.”

  “I’m pretty sure, and that means that it’s a very small pool of suspects. There aren’t that many shifters in any city that can do it. Maybe five in a large animal group. Maybe one in a small.”

  “Do you think the shapeshifter cut up the other men?”

  “No, it’s almost like whatever did it had multiple arms. An arm for every blade.”

  “Do you know any preternatural creature that has multiple arms, Marshal?”

  I thought about it. “There are a lot of mythologies with many-armed creatures, but none native to this country. And frankly, Dr. Memphis, none that I’m sure are real and in existence today.”

  “So hard to tell fact from fiction when we live in a world where myth is real,” he said.

  “Some of it’s extinct,” I said.

  “Whatever killed Randy Sherman wasn’t extinct,” he said.

  I felt that unpleasant smile curl my lips and was glad it was hidden behind the half mask. I wouldn’t want to scare the civvies. “We’ll work on making it extinct.”

  “You’ll need a warrant of execution,” Memphis said.

  “Four dead police officers. One obviously dead by wereanimal attack. Getting the warrant won’t be the problem.”

  “I suppose so,” Memphis said, not like he was entirely happy about it.

  “Something wrong?” I asked.

  “It’s just that I signed the petition that they took to Washington to try to get the Domestic Preternatural Endangerment Act repealed. I believe that the warrants for your job are too broad and violate human rights.”

  “You’re not alone.”

  “Now, all I want is for you to get the bastards that did this; I don’t care that the warrant is based on bad law. So that makes me a hypocrite, Marshal Blake, and I’m not used to thinking of myself that way.”

  “You’ve seen vampire and shapeshifter victims before,” I said.

  He nodded. “Not here, though. Vegas has one of the lowest rates of murder by preternatural means of any city in the United States.”

  I widened my eyes. “I didn’t know that.” In my head I thought, Max and Bibiana run a very tight ship. Out loud I said, “Is this the first person you knew who died like this?”

  “No, first friend, though. I guess if I really believed my convictions, that wouldn’t make a difference.”

  “Emotion always makes a difference,” I said.

  “Even for you?” He looked at me when he asked it.

  I nodded.

  “I’ve heard the screams when the executioner has to stake the vampire during the day. They beg for their lives.”

  “Everyone on death row is innocent, doctor; you know that.”

  “It doesn’t bother you then?”

  I had to look away from that searching gaze. The moment I had to look down, I forced myself to meet his eyes and said the truth. “Sometimes it does.”

  “Then why do it?”

  Was it mean to say the next? I couldn’t tell anymore; maybe it was just true. “I’m sorry for your loss, doctor, I truly am, but this moment is a perfect example of why I do my job. Look at what they did to your friend. Do you want that to happen to someone else’s friend, husband, brother?”

  His face hardened, and it was back to the original hostile look. “No.”

  “Then you need me to do my job, doctor, because once a shapeshifter crosses the line this badly, they almost never go back. They get a taste for letting the beast out. It feels good to them, and they will do it again unless someone stops them.”

  “You mean kills them,” he said.

  “Yes, kills them. I want to kill the shapeshifter that killed your friend, before it kills someone else.”

  It was his turn to look away. “You’ve made your point, Marshal. If you need it, I’ll sign off that a shapeshifter did this, because it’s true.”

  “Thank you, doctor.”

  He nodded. “But the way DPEA is written, you don’t need me to sign anything, do you? You just need to call Washington, and they’ll fax you the warrant.”

  “Contrary to popular media, we do have to assure them it’s preternatural in origin.”

  “Assure them, but not prove beyond the shadow of a doubt.”

  “Shadows of doubt are for courts, doctor.”

  “This shapeshifter is never going to see the inside of a courtroom, is it?”

  “Probably not.”

  He shook his head. “They offered to let someone else work on Randy, but it’s the last thing I can do for him.”

  “No, it’s not, Dr. Memphis. You can help me gather enough evidence to get a warrant and hunt his killer down.”

  “And see, there you go, Marshal, right back at my moral dilemma.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that; I had my own moral dilemma to work on, and I didn’t know Memphis well enough to tell him I was beginning to have doubts about my job, too. I did the only thing I could think of; I went back to work.

  “I am sorry for your loss, but can you let me see the personal effects I missed?” In my head, I added, when I let Olaf run me out of the room, but I kept that part to myself. It was humiliating enough without sharing. I was thinking better without him in the room. I hadn’t realized just how much he was throwing me off my game until he was gone. Division of labor would not leave me alone with him again, I promised myself that.

  In a plastic baggie was a silver pentagram. “Was he Wiccan?”

  “Yes,” Memphis said, “does that matter?”

  “It may be why the shifter ate his face off first.”

  “Explain,” Memphis said.

  “If I’m right, then Sherman was saying a spell, and the shifter stopped him.”

  “There’s no spell against lycanthropes, is there?” Rose asked.

  “No,” I said, “but there are spells that impact other preternatural entities. Spells are almost exclusively for noncorporeal beings.”

  “Like ghosts,” Patricia asked. She’d been so quiet in her corner of the autopsy suite that I’d almost forgotten her.

  I shook my head. “No, not ghosts. You just ignore them. But spirits, entities, demons, and other things like it.”

  “You mean like the devil,” Patricia said.

  “No, my bad, I shouldn’
t have said demon. What I mean is something that is more energy than physical, sort of.”

  “Whatever wielded the knives was very physical,” Memphis said.

  “The knives were very physical, but if Sherman thought a spell could help against them, then maybe whatever was using them wasn’t.”

  “I don’t understand,” Rose said.

  “Nor do I,” Memphis said.

  I hated trying to explain metaphysics. It always came out wrong, or at best confusing. “I’ll need to talk to Sherman’s coven, or at least his high priestess, but if he was any good at the magic side of his faith, then he wouldn’t have wasted breath on something that wouldn’t help save them.”

  “Randy was very devout, and very serious about his faith,” Memphis said.

  I nodded. “Okay, I’ll still want to talk to his priestess, but for right now, I need to see if I can figure out what animal flavor did this.”

  “There are no nonhuman hairs, Marshal,” Memphis said.

  I nodded. “I heard.”

  “It will take time to analyze the claw marks.”

  “That may not help you that much anyway, not in this modified form. We know we’re looking for a smaller person.”

  “What do you mean, Marshal?”

  “When a shapeshifter makes the claws come out, the hand gets bigger than human-normal. Marshal Jeffries was able to palm the marks on the chest. He’s a big guy, but his hands aren’t as big as a shapeshifter’s when it’s in half-man form. That means we’re looking for someone who isn’t that tall, or has smaller hands.”

  “But you just said that the hands get bigger,” Patricia said.

  “Yes, but there’s a limit to how much bigger. If you take two people who are both the same animal, but one is six feet with large hands, and the other is five feet with small hands, when they both shift, the animal form will be larger than their human form, but the smaller man will still be a smaller shapeshifter than the larger man. It’s a mass ratio thing.”

  “I’ve read widely on shapeshifters, Marshal, and I’ve never read where anyone has written that up.”

  I shrugged. “I know shapeshifters, doctor.”

  “All right, then we’re looking for a smaller man.”

  “Or woman,” I said.

  “You really think a woman did this?” he asked.

  “I’ve seen shapeshifters of both sexes do some pretty amazing things, so yeah, this damage doesn’t rule out female.”

  “You said you’re going to try and figure out what animal did this. We’ve got swabs for DNA, and we may get lucky, but if the lycanthrope was in human form except for the claws and teeth, as you maintain, then the DNA may come back human.”

  “There should be some of the virus in the DNA,” I said.

  “Yes, and in a few days we’ll have it back.”

  I shook my head. “We don’t have a few days.”

  “I’m open to suggestions, Marshal.”

  “I told you, I’m carrying lycanthropy; that means that sometimes I can smell things people can’t.”

  “You’re going to try to smell what kind of animal it was.”

  I nodded.

  “But,” Patricia said, “if the shapeshifter was in human form, then won’t it just smell human?”

  “No,” I said, “once you know what you’re smelling, there’s an under-taste.” I shook my head. “I can’t explain this, but I want to try.”

  “I would be eager to see you try,” Memphis said.

  “I’ll have to take the mask down.”

  “That’s against protocols.”

  “I may get my breath, saliva on things, but I can’t catch anything from the . . . Sherman.”

  “If it will catch this creature days early, then do it.”

  I looked at the objects and tried to decide what would be the piece of clothing or equipment that the lycanthrope had gotten the closest to. I looked at it all in the baggies, and finally settled on the throat/ear microphone getup. It had actually been damaged by the teeth.

  “I need one of you to unbag and make sure that the chain of evidence doesn’t get fucked up.”

  “Your smelling something won’t be admissible in court, not even with this many officers dead,” Memphis said.

  “No,” I said, “but I’m not looking for court proof. I’m looking for a clue as to where to go to find people to question. That’s all we can hope to get from this.”

  “If you smell a certain animal, then you’ll go talk to that local group,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  He came over and carefully unbagged the evidence. I took the mask down and leaned forward. I closed my eyes and called on that part of me that wasn’t quite human anymore. I could visualize the beasts inside me: wolf, leopard, lioness, white and yellow tiger. They were all lying in the dark shadows of ancient trees that had been the visualization for my inner place since a certain very ancient vampire had messed with me. Marmee Noir, the Queen of All Vampires, had given me the tigers in a bid to control me. So far, I was still ahead; so far.

  I called, gently, to the beasts, and felt them stir. I could keep them from trying to physically manifest now. I could call them as energy. I tried that now. I needed to scent something. I called on wolf. She came trotting to my call, white with her black markings. I’d done some research and knew that her markings meant the strain of lycanthropy was probably from the far north, someplace cold. You had more white wolves where you got more snow.

  My skin ran in goose bumps, and I lowered my face toward the piece of technology. The first smell was death. The wolf growled, and it trickled out my lips.

  Memphis said, “Are you all right, Marshal?”

  “I’m all right; please don’t talk to me while I do this.”

  The smell of plastic was sharp, almost bitter. The wolf didn’t like it. Underneath that was sweat, fear, and she did like that. Fear and sweat meant food. I pushed the thought back and concentrated. I needed more. I smelled Sherman, the scent of a man, and that he still smelled of the soap and shampoo he’d used that day. It was like peeling the layers off an onion. I think if I’d been a wolf I could have smelled all of it, and interpreted it, but my human brain was slow.

  I felt my nose touch the felt piece, and thought, What animal did this? I smelled saliva, and it wasn’t the same scent as Sherman. Though my mind couldn’t interpret how it was different, it just was. I needed the scent of the animal, not the person. I gave myself over to the wolf, to the feel of fur and pads, and . . . there. The faintest whiff of something not human.

  I followed that faint scent the way you’d follow a path that you found in the woods. A path that was barely there, lost in weeds and small trees. I pushed my way through that narrow opening, and suddenly the world was full of . . . tiger.

  The tigers inside me rushed up, roaring. I stumbled back from the evidence, the scent, Memphis. I fell on my ass on the floor, with the wolf running for cover and the tigers snarling inside my head. Once this would have meant the tigers trying to take over my body, tearing me apart from the inside out, but now I could keep it lower key.

  Someone grabbed my arm, and I looked up. What was this plastic man? I looked past the faceplate and found him human, and soft, and knew that all that education, all that determination, was nothing before claw and fang. I had to try twice to speak, “Room, give me room.”

  He let me go, but just knelt back. I looked at him and the other two. Patricia was afraid, and that made the tigers roil inside me, happy kitties. Fear means food.

  I pushed to my feet and stumbled for the door. I had to get away from them. I should never have tried this without Edward here to make sure . . . make sure it didn’t get out of hand.

  “I need air, that’s all. Don’t touch me.” I made the door and stumbled outside. I ended up on my knees on the floor, leaning against the wall, trying to shove the tigers back into the safety zone. They didn’t want to go. They’d smelled another tiger, and it excited them.

  Edward
spoke from a little distance. “Anita, you all right?”

  I shook my head, but held a hand palm out, to say Stay away. He did. “Talk to me,” he said.

  My voice came breathy, but it came. “I called on a little furry energy to try and get a clue.”

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know what killed the others, but we’re looking for a weretiger that’s probably under six feet in human form, or has abnormally small hands. This one is powerful enough to be able to do claws and teeth only, with no fur and no other outward change.”

  I felt Olaf and Bernardo close, before I looked up and saw them. Edward kept them back, which was probably just as well.

  “Only the most powerful can do that,” Edward said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “You learned all that from smelling?” Bernardo said.

  I looked up, and was pretty sure it wasn’t a friendly look by his reaction. “No, I learned most of that from the body, but tiger was smell.” I looked past him to Olaf now in his black assassin gear, stripped of the hazmat suit. I pointed a finger at him. “I couldn’t think with you in there with me. I didn’t know how useless you make me until you weren’t there.”

  “I did not mean to make you work less efficiently.”

  “You know, I believe that. But from now on you work with someone besides me. No more alone time on the case.”

  “Why is being alone with me so distracting?” he asked, and his face was neutral enough.

  “Because you scare me,” I said.

  He smiled then, a little curl of lips, but his caveman eyes gleamed with satisfaction.

  I stood up then, and Edward was smart enough not to help me. “You know, big guy, most men who really want to date a woman don’t want her afraid of them.”

  His smile faltered a little, but not much. He looked puzzled for a moment, then the smile returned larger and more satisfied. “I am not most men.”

  I gave a sound that might have been a laugh, if it hadn’t been so harsh. “Well, that is the fucking truth.” I started stripping off the protective gear.

  “Where to?” Edward said.

  “We visit the weretigers.”

  “Aren’t they the animal to call of the Master Vampire of Vegas?” he asked.