I should have known there wouldn't be anything that obvious. The police aren't practitioners of the arts, though that is beginning to change, but you can't be a cop long and not look for signs of magic when the shit is this strange.
The scene looked undisturbed, but that didn't mean it was undisturbed. If someone were really good at magic, they could make you not see something. Not true invisibility. Humans don't do that. Physics is physics. Light hits a solid object and bounces. But they can make the eye reluctant to see, so that you keep looking past something and your mind doesn't register it. Like looking for a set of car keys that is sitting in plain sight, lost for two days.
I squatted beside the body. I didn't have the coveralls I usually wore at murder scenes and didn't want the blood to soak into my jeans. I was still hugging myself. There were things here that someone didn't want us to see. But what?
Henderson called, "We found the wallet. Do you want the ID?"
"No," I said. "No." I wasn't being clever. I just didn't want a name, an identity for the thing at my feet. I'd done the trick of turning the body into an it. It wasn't real. It was just something to be studied, examined. It had never been real. To think anything else at that moment would have had me vomiting all over the evidence. I'd done that only once, years ago. Dolph and the gang had never let me live it down.
The eyes had been clawed out and left to dry into blackened lumps on the cheeks. Long hair was plastered along the side of the face, stuck to one shoulder. Maybe blond hair from the color. But it was hard to tell with all the soaked blood. The long hair made me think female. My eyes traveled down and found the remains of clothing. The blouse had been reduced to a lump of cloth under one arm. The chest was bare. One breast torn completely off. The other deflated like a balloon as if something had eaten the flesh out of the middle, like a kid sucking the jelly out of a donut.
It was an unfortunate choice of metaphors, even in my own head. I had to stand up. I had to walk away, blowing air out very fast and too shallow. I went to stand beside one of the trees that edged the clearing. I had to take deep breaths, but that meant the odor went down strong. That sweet, sweet smell slid along my tongue and coated the back of my throat until I couldn't stand the thought of swallowing but didn't know what else to do. I swallowed, and the smell slid down, and my morning coffee inched up.
I had two comforts. One, I'd managed to get outside the blood pattern to vomit. Two, I didn't have much in my stomach to come up. Maybe this was one reason that I've stopped eating breakfast. I get a lot of early-morning body viewing.
I knelt in the dry leaves and felt better. I hadn't thrown up at a crime scene in a long time. At least Zerbrowski wasn't here to rib me about it. I wasn't even embarrassed. Was that a sign of maturity?
Male voices behind me. Sheriff Wilkes saying, almost yelling, "She's just a civvie. She shouldn't be here. She isn't even licensed for this state."
"I'm in charge here, Sheriff. I say who stays and who goes." Henderson wasn't yelling, but his voice carried.
I grabbed the tree trunk to help me stand, and my arm tingled so hard it almost went numb. I stood, pushing away from the tree, nearly falling, but I kept my feet. I looked up the smooth trunk. About eight feet up was a pentagram carved into the bark of the tree. The cut had been darkened with blood. With the dried blood rubbed into it, it was almost invisible against the dark grey bark, but there was also a spell of reluctance on it. So that no one had looked, not even me. Only when I touched the tree did I sense it. Like all illusion, once you see it, you know it's there.
I looked at the other trees and found a bloody pentagram carved into each one. It was a circle of power, of protection. A circle formed of blood and the land itself. Wiccans -- witches -- can use their power for evil if they're willing to pay the price in karma. Whatever you do, good or ill, comes back to you threefold. But even a wiccan gone bad wouldn't carve up a tree. Had the trees, the land, themselves, been invoked? That might mean an elemental. They could be nasty. But they didn't feel evil. They felt angry if you messed with their land, but they weren't evil, more angry-neutral. I'd gotten that whiff of evil as I passed through the circle. Evil with a capital E. There just aren't that many preternatural critters that trip that particular wire.
"Captain Henderson," I said. I had to say it twice before they stopped arguing and looked at me.
They both looked at me. Neither looked friendly, but at least I knew who they were mad at: each other. Local cops don't like anybody horning in on their turf. It was normal for the local police to resent outsiders. But I knew that Wilkes had more to protect than his turf. He must be frantic having real cops here now. But now wasn't the time to spill the beans. I had no proof. Accusing a policeman of corruption tends to upset the other cops.
"Did you see the pentagrams on the trees?"
The question was strange enough that they both stopped being angry and paid attention. I pointed the pentagrams out, and like all good illusion, once I showed them, they could see it. The emperor has no clothes.
"So?" Wilkes said.
"So, this was a circle of protection, of power. Something was called here to kill her."
"The marks on the trees could have been here for days," Wilkes said.
"Test the blood on the pentagrams," I said. "It won't be hers, but it will be fresh."
"Why isn't it the victim's?" Henderson asked.
"Because they used the blood to seal the circle. They had to have the blood before the death."
"It was a human sacrifice then," Henderson said.
"Not exactly," I said.
"This was a troll kill," Wilkes said. He didn't sound sure; he sounded desperate.
Henderson turned to him. "You keep saying that, Wilkes. You keep saying it was trolls."
"That biologist herself said it looked like primates. It sure as hell wasn't a person. There aren't that many primates running around the Tennessee hills."
"She said humanoid," I said.
They both looked at me again.
"Dr. Onslow said humanoid. A lot of people assume humanoid means primate, but there are other options."
"Like what?" Wilkes said. His beeper went off. He checked the number, then looked at me. "Excuse me, Captain Henderson."
Henderson looked at me. "Do you and the sheriff have some sort of history, Ms. Blake?"
I frowned. "History? How?"
"He was very certain that you shouldn't be anywhere near this body. He was also very certain that this was a troll kill. Very certain."
"Who called you guys then?"
"An anonymous tip."
We looked at each other. "Who suggested I get to join the fun?"
"One of the EMS crew. The man's usual partner met you last night."
I shook my head. "I don't know him."
"His regular partner is a girl. Lucy something."
That explained Lucy's medical knowledge, and why she wasn't working on the day of the full moon. Don't want to be around fresh blood with the moon almost full. Too tempting. Too chancy.
"I remember her vaguely, I guess." I remembered her more than vaguely, but the last time I'd seen her was just after I'd murdered someone, so I was going to be fuzzy on the details. For one awful moment, I wondered if Henderson had been trying to trick me and the body was really Lucy. But the height was wrong. The woman had been tall, not my size. Most of the women that Richard dated were short. I guess if you've got a body type you like, you stick to it. My choice of victims seemed to be a lot wider.
"Why did they need a power circle, Ms. Blake?" Henderson asked.
"To keep in what they called."