Then she knelt by Johnson’s body, only it wasn’t Johnson anymore, it was Cesar, and he was naked too. They rolled in the dust, coupling like dogs, but Cesar was screaming. When she raised her head, blood masked her mouth and dripped from her chin and poured from Cesar’s throat. Yellow flecks sparkled in her dark-brown eyes.
“I just love brave men,” she said. “They’re delicious.”
“CHRIST!”
This time there were cigarettes under his searching hand. He fumbled the lighter twice. The dark coal glowed like eyes as he sucked in the smoke. Salvador fumbled for the light switch and sat with his feet on the floor. He pulled the smoke into his lungs again, coughed, inhaled again. After a while his hands stopped shaking, and he looked at the time. It was just three o’clock, which meant he’d been asleep a bit less than two hours. The air in his bedroom smelled close, despite the warm breeze that rattled the Venetian blinds against the frame of the window. Sweat cooled on his back and flanks.
He looked at the phone. “I’m not going to call. Cesar puts up with a lot, but he’s not sleeping alone. I can’t tell him I had a bad—”
The phone rang. He picked it up.
“Jefe ?
“There’s anyone else at this address?”
“Get over here. I’ve got something you need to see.”
SALVADOR KNEW SOMETHING WAS WRONG. HE COULD FEEL IT, A PRICKLING along the back of his neck. The house was completely dark except for the light from the streetlamp, which was very damned odd even at three thirty, since Cesar had just called him. His partner’s new Chinese import was parked in the driveway; the ground between the road and the house was gravel with a few weeds poking through. The neighborhood was utterly quiet, and the stars were bright. A cat walked by, looked at him with eyes that turned into green mirrors for an instant, and then passed. Nothing else moved.
“Shit,” he mouthed soundlessly, and pulled his Glock 22, his thumb moving the safety to off.
Then he touched the door. It swung in. He crossed the hallway, instinctively keeping the muzzle up and tucking his shoulder into the angle between the bedroom door and the wall. Then the smell hit him. He looked down. It looked black in the low light, but the tackiness under his foot was unmistakable.
“WELL, THAT’S UNIQUE,” THE CHIEF SAID.
The forensics team moved around the room. Most of them had more than one hat; Santa Fe’s police force didn’t run to elaborate hierarchies.
Salvador felt a surge of anger, and throttled it back automatically. It wouldn’t help . . . and he’d said the same sort of thing. You did, it helped you deal with what you were seeing. Usually.
Cecile was on the bed. Usually bodies didn’t have much expression, but usually they weren’t arched in a galvanic spasm that was never going to end. They’d have to break her bones to get her into a body bag. The look on her face was not quite like anything he’d ever seen. He licked his lips, tasting the salt of sweat.
Cesar was naked, lying on his face between the bed and the window. His pistol was in his right hand; the spent brass of fourteen shells littered the floor around him. Most of them were in the coagulating blood, turned dark red now with brown spots. In his left was clutched a knife, not a fighting knife, some sort of tableware. A wedge of glass as broad as a man’s hand at its base was in his throat, the point coming out the back of his neck.
“This is a murder-suicide,” the chief said quietly.
Salvador stirred. The older man didn’t look at him. “That’s exactly what it is, Eric.”
He doesn’t call me by my first name very often.
“Probably that’s what the evidence will show. Sir,” Salvador added.
I’ve seen friends die before. I didn’t sit down and cry. I did my job. I can do it now.
He hadn’t been this angry then, either. He’d killed every mouj he could while he was on the rock pile, and that had been a good round number, but he hadn’t usually hated them. Sort of a sour disgust, most of the time; he hadn’t thought of them as personal enough to hate, really.
This is extremely personal.
“Chief.”
That was one of the evidence squad. He walked around the pool of blood to them. “We got something on the windowsill, going out. Sort of strange. When did you say you got here, Salvador?”
“Three thirty. Half an hour after . . . Cesar called me.”
The night outside was still dark, but there was a staleness, a stillness to it, that promised dawn.
Baffled, Salvador shook his head. The man held up his notebook. The smudge he’d recorded on the ledge turned into a print. A paw print.
“You notice a dog? Or something else like that?”
“No,” he said dully. “Just a cat.”
“Well, that’s not it.” The print was too large for a house cat. “Probably just something drawn by the smell.”
“Time of death?”
“Recent but hard to pin down, on a warm night like this. Everything’s fully compatible with sometime between the time you got the phone call and the time you called it in.”
The chief put a hand on his shoulder and urged him outside. He fumbled in the pockets of his jacket and pulled out a cigarette and lit it.
“You know you can’t be on this investigation, Eric,” the older man said. “Go home. Get some sleep. Crawl into a bottle and get some sleep if you have to. Take a couple of days off.”
Salvador nodded, flicked the cigarette into the weedy gravel of the front yard, and walked steadily over to his car. He pulled out very, very carefully, and drove equally carefully to St. Francis, down to the intersection with Rodeo and the entrance to the I-25. Only then did he pull over into a boarded-up complex of low buildings, probably originally meant for medical offices or real estate agents, built by some crazed optimist back in the late aughts or early teens.
“Okay, Cesar, talk to me,” he said aloud, and slid the data card he’d palmed into the slot on his notebook; nobody would notice, not when he’d left his shoes standing in the pool of blood. “This better not be your taxes. Tell me how to get the cabron.”
The screen came on, only one file, and that was video. Salvador tapped his finger on it.
Vision. Three ten in the carat at the lower right corner. Cesar was sweating as he spoke, wearing a bathrobe but with his Glock sitting in front of him within range of the pickup camera; the background was his home-officecum-TV-room, lit only by one small lamp.
“I’m recording this before you get here, jefe, ’cause I’ve got a really bad feeling about this. I was on the net tonight and I got a query from the Quantico analysis lab we sent the puke and blood to back when, you know? They said there were some interesting anomalies and did I want any more information on the Brézé guy, and they attached the file. It looked like a legit file, it was big enough.”
Cesar’s image licked its lips; Salvador could see that, but his mind superimposed how he’d looked with half his face lying in a pool of his own blood.
“Okay, it was stupid. I should have asked them Who dat? or just hit the spam blocker. We weren’t getting anywhere, creeping Adrian Brézé’s house is desperation stuff, so I downloaded. Here’s what I got, repeated a whole lot of times.”
Letters appeared, a paragraph of boldface:
—youaresofuckedyouaresofuckedyouaresofuckedyouareso—
“I—”
“Cesar!” A scream, a woman’s voice, high and desperate. Then: “Don’t—don’t—please , don’t—”
Then just screaming. Cesar snatched up the pistol and ran. Salvador heard himself screaming too, as the shots began. Then more sounds, for a long time. Then another face in the screen.