“If it’s a hunt and the marshal in question just can’t safely locate and destroy the target, then no harm, no foul. They may send in more experienced marshals to help with the hunt, but it remains the original marshal’s warrant, and they remain in charge of the hunt,” I said.
Newman added, “But if it’s someone like Bobby that’s already in custody, then refusal of the warrant by the marshal gets written up. If you refuse to complete three warrants, then you’re given a chance to transfer to normal Marshals Service or you’re fired.”
“Is the preternatural branch losing a lot of personnel that way?” Livingston asked.
Newman shrugged.
“Some,” I said. “Not everyone has the stomach for it.”
“But now do you understand why it’s so important for us to find reasonable cause to lengthen the warrant timeline?” Newman asked.
“So you can avoid getting written up for dereliction of duty,” Duke said.
“It’s not dereliction of duty, Duke. How would you feel if you let me kill Bobby and then we do find out he was framed? Could you live with that?”
Duke shook his head, but I’m not sure it was an answer to the question. “Let Blake see the room where Ray died. Let her smell it. Then see if she still wants to save the poor wereleopard.”
“Fine, let’s go,” I said.
We left Livingston and Kaitlin discussing if she was getting in the cage with a wereleopard. Frankie stayed behind to answer questions about what had happened back at the jail. I hoped she was willing to share that Duke had lost it, but in the end, I guess that didn’t matter. What mattered was that the state cops helped us delay long enough to either kill Bobby Marchand with a clear conscience or save him.
15
IF THE LIVING room was big, this room was cavernous. I’d never been in a regular house that had a room this large. Jean-Claude and I had looked at some wedding venues that had ballrooms, and even most of them weren’t as big as Ray Marchand’s study. It was big and dark, with only a handful of lamps around the room giving off golden pools that seemed to make more shadows rather than illuminate the darkness. Maybe the smells of blood and death in the air made the room feel grim. Maybe, but I’d have given a lot for an overhead light. There were chairs and a couch that looked like leather, more masculine versions of the living room furniture. There were two lamps: one beside the couch and the other, a reading lamp, curved over the back of the room’s comfiest and highest-backed chair, which was closest to the fireplace. That chair looked cozy. I shone my flashlight near it and found beside it a short stack of books on a table. Very cozy. I caught a shape at the edge of the light and had my gun out and pointed before I’d really shone the light full on it.
My heart was in my throat, beating so hard, it almost choked me as I stared into the eyes of a full-grown bobcat. Newman said, “Don’t shoot. It’s stuffed,” about the time I’d already decided that the yellow eyes staring at me were glass.
“Shit,” I said softly but with feeling.
“There’s a lot of taxidermy in here,” Newman said, and swept his flashlight up along the right side of the room to show a herd of animal heads on the wall.
I recognized water buffalo and more kinds of antelope, or maybe they were gazelles, than I could name, all silent and staring, their horns curving gracefully in the still air. The rhino head did not look graceful; it just looked big. There was a pair of lion heads—a big maned male and a lioness snarling beside him. She looked shorn next to her mate. My own inner lion flared to life just at a glimpse of amber eyes in the darkness of my mind or maybe my gut. I had a second of smelling the sun and heat on grass halfway around the world that I’d never smelled as a human being, and then it was gone. The leopard head didn’t seem to offend my inner one, because it didn’t react.
“Wait until you see what’s in the corner,” Newman said. I joined my flashlight beam to his, and we swept across animal heads from almost every continent, and then in the corner was the showstopper: a full-grown elephant. I mean a full-size bull elephant complete with tusks gleaming in the dark like huge white fangs.
“Well, fuck,” I said.
“Elegant as always,” Newman said. He was smiling when I glanced at him.
“I’m glad you’re enjoying the stuffed toys,” Leduc said, “but could you look at the blood and actual crime scene?”
He seemed offended that I’d ignored the signs of new death to goggle at the old. But I’d seen more wereanimal attacks than I could count now. I’d never seen this many taxidermied animals outside of a natural history museum. I mean, who has a stuffed adult African elephant in their house? It was u-fucking-nique.
But I dutifully moved toward him in the plastic booties that we were all wearing so we wouldn’t contaminate the crime scene. If it had been a normal warrant of execution, we might not even have bothered, because what did it matter if we contaminated everything if we were just going to shoot someone and leave?
The blood was beside a huge wooden desk that dominated the center of the room. The desk was obviously an antique. It had that rich, much-loved patina to it that only time and care will give to wood, like the banister on this side of the house. The wooden printer stands were nice but modern. The wooden file cabinets were a mix of old and new. They formed a half wall behind the big leather office chair. It was a complete office in the middle of the room; its “floor” was differentiated by a large square Persian or Oriental, or whatever the politically correct term is for it now. The carpet looked as old as the desk and as well-made, but they’d never get all the blood out of it.
There’s more blood in an adult human being than any forensic show will ever be able to put on TV or in a movie. You’ll have some horror films that go overboard and cover everything in gore, but no fiction hits that middle ground of truth. No episode of CSI has ever shown the viewer how much blood there would actually be. No visual can give you its raw-meat smell—it smells close to raw hamburger to me—but if I ever had any doubts that our bodies are just so much meat, violent murder scenes take any illusion away.
The top of the desk was completely clear because everything that had been on it was on the floor, as if the struggle had knocked it all off. A stapler, a desk lamp, and a real, honest-to-God corded telephone landline were in among the smaller office supplies and the blood. The office chair was set so that the victim would have been facing the door when he was sitting at his desk. He might have turned his back to check the file cabinets, but other than that, he had to have seen anyone coming into the room.
I moved carefully around the debris on the floor. The only thing that seemed to be damaged was the desk lamp. It was shattered as if someone had picked it up and slammed it against the floor or something else. Had our victim tried to defend himself with it? Except it was on top of the blood. All the things that looked like they’d come off the desk were on the blood, not under it. I knelt down, perching on the balls of my feet so I had less chance of stepping in or on evidence as I peered at the lamp.
“There’s blood on the lamp,” I said.
“There’s blood on everything,” Duke said.
“No,” I said, standing back up, “there isn’t. There should be blood all over the things that got knocked off the desk, but they’re all on top of the blood, like they fell to the floor after he was dead or at least after he was on the floor.”
“So what?” Duke said.
“So, if the things were knocked off the desk during a struggle, some of them should have blood on them,” I said.
“You are so busy trying to make this into something it’s not that you don’t see what’s in front of your face,” Duke said.
I faced him. His brown eyes looked almost black in the dim light. “Or maybe it’s you that’s trying to make it something it’s not. We’re trying to save a life. What’s your motivation?”
“What are you trying to say, Marshal?�
��
“I’m just asking why you are so set on this being a wereanimal kill.”
“Because that’s what it is, Blake. It’s you and Newman who are complicating things, not me.”
“Not every case is simple,” I said.
“Do you complicate the rest of your life as much as you do your professional one?”
I almost answered an automatic no, then realized it wasn’t true. “The older I get, the more I realize that most people’s personal lives are complicated, but professionally my job is usually dead simple, Sheriff. I hunt down murderers, and I kill them.”
He made a harsh sound that was almost a laugh. “The older you get, Blake? You haven’t hit thirty yet. You don’t even know what older means yet.”
“I’m thirty-two. Does being over thirty automatically gain me more respect?”
“Yeah, it does,” he said.
“Why? I understand that you gain experience as you get older, but growing wiser and better at being a human being isn’t automatic with age.”
“Is that a jab at me?” he asked, trying to hook his thumbs in his belt and failing because of his weight. It made me debate again how rapid the weight gain had been if he was still trying to use his body like it was far smaller. Had he eaten the stress of his daughter’s illness, and this was the result?
“No, but you’ve been in uniform long enough to have met losers and idiots of every decade. Older doesn’t mean wiser for some people. Hell, some people live hundreds of years, and they’re still idiots.”
“Vampires don’t count, Blake. They aren’t people.”
“Is that a jab at me because I’m about to marry one of them?”
Duke looked surprised and then got his angry, arrogant look back in place. “How the hell would I know who you were going to marry? Contrary to what you might think, Blake, not everyone follows your personal life on social media.”
“Fine, but now that you do know I’m about to marry a vampire, do you want to rethink your comment?”
“Why? It’s the truth,” he said, and he stared at me as if waiting to see if it hurt my feelings.
I laughed. It made him jump as if I’d poked him with a stick.
“That wasn’t meant to be funny,” he said, and his tone had gone from angry to hateful. I don’t think he liked being laughed at, which was fine with me.
“You just called vampires not people. That’s a step up from soulless monster, which is what my grandmother called my fiancé. She told me I’d be damned forever if I married him. My father isn’t sure he can walk me down the aisle, not in good conscience. He’s a devout Catholic, and the Church still considers vampires unconsecrated dead like suicides at best and at worst a type of minor demon.”
The hatred in Duke’s eyes softened a little. Maybe I’d surprised him, or maybe it was sympathy. “I would give anything to be able to walk my Lila down the aisle to someone she loved. I’d hate it if I hated him, but I’d by God walk her down on my arm and be proud to do it.” His eyes seemed to glimmer in the dim light. He shook his head a little too fast and said, “I’m going to go make sure that everyone is doing their jobs. These are the two biggest cases that Hanuman has seen in . . . hell, maybe ever.” He turned his head so that we couldn’t see his face before he turned the rest of him for the door and walked out.
16
“IF HE WASN’T being a pain in our asses, I’d feel sorry for the sheriff,” I said.
“I feel sorry for him anyway,” Newman said.
“Yeah, me, too. I always hate it when people that are making my life difficult turn out to have real emotions and real lives. Makes me feel all conflicted about wanting to kick them in the ass.”
Newman snorted a laugh. “You do have a way with words, Blake.”
“Yeah, sarcasm is one of my best things.” I shone my flashlight around the room. It was a bright light, but the far end of the room just swallowed it up.
“How big is this damn room, and why aren’t there more lights?”
“The floor-to-ceiling windows behind the drapes give plenty of light in the daytime, and there are more lights. You just have to walk through the room and turn them on one by one,” he said.
“Let’s do that.”
“I didn’t think you’d be afraid of the dark, Blake.”
I started to say I wasn’t but then changed my response to “I’m not afraid of normal darkness.”
“What other kind of darkness is there?” he asked.
“Trust me, Newman, you don’t want to know.”
The memory of blackness that had a voice and a mind of its own tried to become a clearer memory, but I chased it away by finding a lamp to turn on near the wall of weapons. That warm golden glow chased back the literal darkness and helped me short-circuit the memory of the Mother of All Darkness. She was dead now, or as dead as we could make her. It’s hard to kill things that have no corporeal body to destroy.
I gazed up at the wall of weapons. There were antique guns, and there were swords of every shape and size with blades that were round, jagged like a lightning bolt, or curved like a wave of the ocean cast in metal. I even saw things that looked like bladed metal whips that I couldn’t even figure out how to wield. The guns started with what I thought were blunderbusses, but they might have just been muskets. I wasn’t the weapons expert that Edward was; he’d have probably known what everything was, along with its historical accuracy or inaccuracy. I knew just enough to confirm that the weapons were certainly not arranged by time period or culture or any other criteria except that they fit on the wall. It was like a museum display designed by a person who had been doing way too many drugs—or maybe it was supposed to be an artistic design?
I tried standing farther back from the wall to see if there was a pattern to the weapons that made sense to my eyes. I’d have settled for just a pretty design, but nope, it was just a wall covered in weapons without any rhyme or reason that I could see.
“They have some weapons that belonged to actual Marchand ancestors going back centuries,” Newman said from behind me.
“How did they hold on to things like this? My grandparents came from Germany, but most of the family heirlooms went to finance the trip,” I said.
“Was your family nobility?”
“No,” I said.
“The Marchands were, and not just land rich and money poor but wealthy and noble. They had enough money to keep the family jewels and stuff together.”
“Did you know all this about the family before the murder, or did you learn it afterward?” I asked.
“Some before. I mean, how often do you see a room like this in real life in America? There may be tons of houses with this kind of stuff in Europe, but you don’t see it here.”
“True,” I said, and walked farther down the wall to find new animals mounted in the far corner. There was a black leopard head on the wall this time, and a skin that matched stretched up on the wall beside it. The paws were missing, but someone had done a good job of stretching out the skin so there wasn’t much shrinkage. It had been a big leopard, probably a male. It would have looked even more impressive if there hadn’t been a full-size tiger skin right beside it. Tigers are the largest land predator, not just the largest big cat. The huge striped skin made the rich black of the leopard look smaller than I knew it was, like Mutt and Jeff in fur. The tiger’s head was mounted on the other side of its skin.
Newman turned on a pole lamp in the far corner, and more animals sprang to “life.” There were monkey heads with impressive canines visible. There was a glass case full of brilliant birds that were unknown to me. In fact there were several cases of birds. Then, in the corner, was an elephant head with smaller ears than the ones on the full-body version across the room. The tiger had clued me in that this group of animals was from the Indian subcontinent, but the Asian elephant was the other clue. If I’d known more abo
ut the birds in that area of the world, or the monkeys, I’d have probably figured it out from those specimens. The first corner had felt like trophies, but this one had more of a scientific feel to it. I mean, what Great White Hunter collects birds? Apparently this one, because more than anything else in the room, this corner felt like one hand, one mind, had put it together. I wondered if this Marchand ancestor had done his own taxidermy. That might explain why it was just heads and skins for the bigger animals and full bodies for the birds. My understanding is the bigger the animal, the more challenging it is to stuff and mount.
There were a few primitive-looking weapons scattered among the heads, but they were more carefully placed, with the same eye for detail that had arranged the birds in lifelike poses behind glass. The other animals just looked dead—impressively preserved, but dead. The birds looked like they should have moved or had just stopped moving a moment before. I could recognize the art here.
Newman turned on two other floor lamps, and there were full-size family portraits that wouldn’t have fit in Muriel’s car. I assumed the paintings were of family, because though the people in them were attractive for the most part, they looked grim, except for a pair of young women in one painting and a couple with five small children plus the family dog in another. That one was the most natural and gave you a sense of an oil portrait rather than just an oil painting. There were four small spaces on the wall, all in a row, that were bare, but the frames had been there so long, the wall was a different color underneath, so that their loss stood out even on a wall full of art.
“They were here when I first toured the room,” Newman said.
“Do you really think that Muriel and her husband planned on blaming the police and emergency responders for the thefts?”
“I think they would have tried,” he said, turning on a smaller lamp that was on top of a full-size grand piano.
If we’d started with the piano, I would have been impressed, but after all the rest, I shrugged it off as no big deal, though the wood gleamed with years, maybe decades, of polish and care. There were more pictures on top of the piano, but these were photos. Some looked like women in nineteenth-century clothes. Others had men posing with what might have been some of the specimens in the room, but the animals were freshly killed and limp with death. The tiger’s head was propped up so it was looking at the camera. The black leopard that a mustached man had just caught was hung upside down like a fish. It looked so terribly dead. The man’s arm was in a sling, and there were bandages along one side of his face. It looked like the leopard had given him a run for his money and for both their lives. It made me strangely happy that the leopard had cut the man up before it died. I’d grown up hunting with my father, but we’d hunted deer and rabbits, never predators. He’d raised me with the belief that if you couldn’t eat it, you didn’t need to hunt it. I tried not to feel like I was on the leopard’s side as I looked at that long-ago man standing so upright beside the animal that he’d hung by its hind legs like a deer. I guess dead meat is dead meat, and certainly the animal had been beyond caring, but it seemed like an insult. The leopard had marked him, hunted the hunter. To me that made it a foe. You should respect your opponents even in death. Hanging them up like a big fish for a photo just felt wrong to me.
Sucker Punch Page 12