"Anita Blake, Captain Henderson," Maiden said.
He looked straight at me, and his eyes were cool and grey with swirling flecks of green. He was handsome in a clean-cut, ordinary sort of way. He might have been more than that, but there was a harshness to his face, a sourness, that robbed him of something likeable and pleasant.
No matter how funky the eye color when he looked at me, the eyes were distant, judging, cop eyes. "So you're Anita Blake?" His voice was almost angry.
I nodded. "Yes." I didn't let the anger get to me. He wasn't angry at me. Something was wrong. Something beyond the crime itself. I wondered what.
He looked me up and down, not sexual, but as if he were taking my measure. I was used to that, though it was usually a little less blatant. "How strong's your stomach, Blake?"
I raised eyebrows at that, then smiled.
"What in the hell is funny?" Henderson said.
"Look, I know it's bad. I just left your sergeant at the top of the hill so spooked he wouldn't come near it a second time. Maiden here's already told me it's awful. Just take me to the body."
Henderson stepped up, invading the hell out of my personal space. "You that confident that you can take it, Blake?"
I sighed. "No."
The no seemed to take some of the anger away. He blinked and took a step back. "No?" he said.
"I don't know if I can take it, Captain Henderson. There's always the chance that the next horror will be something so awful, I'll never recover. Something that stains my mind and sends me screaming. But so far, so good. So, take me to see the grisly remains. The foreplay is getting tiresome."
I watched the emotions play over his face: amusement, then anger, but finally, amusement won. Lucky me. "The grisly remains. Are you sure you're not a reporter?"
That made me smile. "I'm guilty of a lot of sins, but that's not one of them."
That made him smile. When he smiled, he looked ten years younger and was more than just ordinarily handsome. "Okay, Ms. Blake, follow me. I'll take you to see the grisly remains." He laughed soft, low, and deeper than his speaking voice, as if when he sang he might be a bass. "I hope you're as amusing after you've seen the show, Ms. Blake."
"Me, too," I said.
He gave me a strange look, then led the way down the hill. I followed because it was my job. An hour ago, I'd have said the day couldn't get much worse. I had a sinking feeling it was about to get worse -- much worse.
33
The body lay in a small clearing. I knew it was human because they told me it was. It wasn't that the body didn't look human, exactly. The shape was there enough that I could tell it was lying on its back. It was more that my mind refused to acknowledge that this could have been a human being. My eyes saw it, but my mind kept refusing to put the pieces together, so it was like looking at one of those pictures where you stare and stare until the hidden shapes spin out in 3-D relief. It looked as if there had been an explosion of blood and flesh, and the body had been at the center of it. Dried blood spread out from the body in every direction, as if when the body were moved there'd be a body-shaped clean spot, like an ink blot.
I could see all that, but still my eyes couldn't make sense of it. My mind was trying to protect me. It had happened before -- once or twice. The smart thing would be to turn and walk away. Let my mind have its confusion because the truth was going to be one of those mind-blasting moments. I'd jokingly told Henderson at the top of the hill that some things stain the mind. It wasn't funny now.
I forced myself to look at it, forced myself not to look away, but the summer heat wavered around me in a sickening rush. I wanted to cover my eyes with my hands, but I settled for turning away. Covering my eyes would look silly and childish, like blotting out the worst of a horror movie.
Henderson turned when I did. If I wasn't going to look at the body, then he wouldn't, either. "You okay?"
The world stopped spinning like a ball that had slid to a stop. "I will be." My voice sounded breathy.
"Good," he said.
We stood that way for a few seconds more, then I took a shallow breath. I knew better than to take a deep one this close to the body. I had to do this. Trolls didn't do this. No natural animal did this. I turned slowly around to face the body. It hadn't gotten any better.
Henderson turned with me. He was the man in charge. He could take it if I could. I wasn't sure I could, but since I was out of other choices ...
I'd borrowed surgical gloves. Someone had offered me heavier plastic gloves to go over. AIDS, you know. I declined. One, my hands would sweat. Two, if I had to feel the body for clues, I wouldn't be able to feel shit. Three, with three vampire marks on me, I didn't sweat AIDS anymore. I was free from blood-borne disease, so I'd been told. I believed Jean-Claude on this one because he wouldn't want to lose me. I was a third of his triumvirate. He wanted me safe. In the back of my head a voice said, He loves you. The voice in the front of my head said, Yeah right.
"Can I track up the blood pattern?" I asked.
"You can't get close to the body unless you step in the blood," Henderson said.
I nodded. "True. So you've videotaped it, gotten all your pictures?"
"We know how to do our job, Ms. Blake."
"I'm not questioning that, Captain. I need to know if I can move the body around, that's all. I don't want to fuck up the evidence."
"When you're done with it, we'll be bagging it up."
I nodded. "Okay." I stared down at the body and suddenly could see it. All of it. I hugged my arms across my stomach to keep my hands from covering my eyes. The nose had been bitten off so that it was just a bloody hole. The lips were torn away until teeth and the bones of the jaw were visible under the drying blood. The muscles of the jaw were missing on the side facing me. Whatever had done this hadn't just taken a quick bite. It had sat down and fed.
So many bites, so much missing flesh, but most of it too shallow to kill. I said a short prayer that most of the bites were postmortem. Even as I prayed, I was pretty sure I wouldn't get a good answer; there was too much blood. She'd been alive through most of it. Intestines spilled out of the ripped jeans in a dried nest covered in thicker things than blood. The outhouse smell of her lower intestines being ripped would have faded by now. One smell dies, but there's always another. Her body had started to ripen in the summer beat. It is a smell that is hard to describe, both overwhelmingly sweet and bitter enough to gag. I took shallow breaths and stepped onto the dried splatter.
Something moved through me like a phantom blow. The hair on the back of my neck tried to crawl down my spine. That part of my brain that had nothing to do with cars or indoor plumbing and everything to do with running and screaming and not thinking at all, was whispering now. It was whispering that something was wrong. Something evil had been here -- not just dangerous, evil.
I waited to see if the feeling would grow stronger, but it faded. It faded like a bad memory, which probably meant I'd walked through the edge of some kind of spell -- or rather, the remnants of one, a nasty one.
You didn't call something this evil without a circle of protection either for the sorcerer to stand in or for the beastie to be put inside of. I searched the ground, but there was nothing but blood. The blood didn't form a circle of protection. It was just splatter, mess, no pattern.