The only thing I knew about my partner right then was that he wasn't the one lying dead on the living room floor. "Is Karl OK?" I asked Scanlon.
"Far as I know. I assume he spends the day in there."
Scanlon jerked a thumb at the door to one of the bedrooms. When Karl joined the ranks of the undead, he had some modifications made to the place. One of them involved installing a lock on the bedroom door – and not just any lock. This thing was a double-bolted monster made by Gardall and the only way to open it, short of blasting, was by touching the right sequence of numbers on a keypad. Since a lock is only as good as the door it guards, Karl had installed a new one of those, too – iron, surrounded by a steel frame.
"Yeah, that's his bedroom," I said.
"For obvious reasons, we couldn't go in there and check on him. You got the lock combination?"
"Yeah, he gave it to me."
Scanlon nodded toward the monster of a door. "You mind?"
"Not in the least," I said. In fact, he'd have had a hard time stopping me from going in there.
I tapped in the eight-digit code, being careful to shield the keypad with my body. I trusted Scanlon, but with this information, Karl didn't trust anybody – except me.
I heard the lock disengage after I'd touched the final digit. I turned the knob and pushed the door slowly open.
Karl's bedroom looked the way it had the only other time I'd been here – a couple of bureaus, matching nightstands, and the bed – that was it. The human-sized lump in the bed was covered by a heavy blanket, which I carefully peeled back to reveal the sleeping bag where Karl spent the day. I pulled the zipper down a couple of feet and looked at my partner. Karl Renfer looked dead – but that time of day, he was supposed to. More important, there was no sign that anything had been done to change him from "undead" to "true dead".
I only realized I'd been holding my breath when I started breathing again.
I zipped up the sleeping bag and replaced the blanket. I left a note where Karl would be sure to see it, briefly explaining what had happened in his living room. I didn't want him to freak when he got up at sunset and went in there. Then I left the bedroom, closing the door firmly behind me until I felt the lock catch.
"Karl's fine," I said to Scanlon. "You don't need to let anybody else in there, do you?"
Scanlon shook his head. "No reason to. It's pretty obvious this is where all the action went down."
I was glad he said that, because if he'd wanted to send the forensics people poking around Karl's bedroom, I was going to have a sudden attack of amnesia regarding that lock combination. That might lead to some unpleasantness.
"Who called it in?" I asked Scanlon.
"Lady down the hall. She works part-time as a medical transcriptionist, and today's her day off. Says she heard what sounded like a thud coming from this end of the hall. Took her a couple of minutes to make up her mind to check it out, which is just as well. If she'd run into the perp as he was leaving, he'd probably have iced her, too."
"Most likely," I said, "but I hope you didn't tell her that. She'll never come out of her apartment during the day again."
"I decided not to share my conclusion with her," Scanlon said. "So, she decides to check out this 'thud' and takes a slow walk down the hall. God knows what she expected to find, but she did notice that Karl's door was ajar a couple of inches."
"I thought that kind of thing only happened on TV," I said.
"Yeah, I know what you mean. It's not unreasonable, though. The perp is in a hurry, he closes the door behind him, but doesn't stick around to make sure the latch has caught, the door falls open a couple of inches."
"Cheap locks," I said. "No wonder Karl installed his own."
"I would, too," Scanlon said. "So, Mrs Randall sees the gap between the door and the frame, comes over, and peeks through it. Turns out the line of sight gives her a clear view of the dead guy here, along with the mess on the wall. So she runs back to her apartment and calls 911."
"A public-spirited citizen," I said. "We need more of those."
I walked over to the wall decorated with most of the contents of the victim's skull. Amid the blood, bone fragments, and brain tissue were a number of small holes, each about the size of a dried pea.
I went over next to Scanlon, and we stood there staring, side by side, like a couple of dweebs visiting an art museum for the first time.
"Shotgun," I said to Scanlon.
"Uh-huh."
"By the size and number of the holes, I'd say doubleought buck. Those pellets are so big, the cartridge only holds eight of 'em."
"That's what Forensics thinks, too."
I looked down at the corpse. "They make suppressors for shotguns these days, you know."
"Yeah, I've read about those," Scanlon said.
"'Course, you can only do so much with a shotgun, when it comes to sound suppression."
"Those fuckers are pretty loud, all right."
"Best you can hope for, even with a good suppressor, is to reduce the noise from blam to something kind of like a thud."
"Sounds about right," Scanlon said. He turned and looked at me. "I read a report the other day about a dude who supposedly used a suppressed shotgun to take out a couple of goblins, who were attempting to eviscerate an officer of the law."
"That's what happened, all right."
"According to the report, the officer in question was able to make a tentative identification of the suspect."
"Yeah," I said. "He was."
"Which leads us to the question," Scanlon said, "of what the fuck Sharkey was doing here, blowing the head off some would-be vampire slayer."