Under a Blood Moon Page 10

  “We could go back to the WPL.”

  “With what? We don’t have any proof that the killer was a werewolf—just my paranormal knowledge, which won’t hold up in court. Even then, all they have to say is, it wasn’t one of ours. We’re stuck waiting for something to break loose. The lab reports will come in, or someone will see Madame Marie, and we’ll go from there. For now, it’s too early to get upset.”

  “So you don’t think Marie was abducted?” he asked.

  “Even if she was, what would we do? Start a statewide manhunt for a woman with a list of prior arrests and a known association with her supposed captors?” I stood firm on the higher ground. Paperwork was an important part of an investigation. Besides I wanted, no, I needed a nice pleasant couple of days off.

  “Fine,” he sighed. “I guess you’re right. I just can’t stop thinking about that third nurse.”

  That ruined it for me. My carefully built logic came crashing down. Without the nurse, it was people who didn’t deserve my time or people who were dead and couldn’t benefit from it. I cringed at the thought of her watching her coworkers die in such a gruesome way.

  “All right, where do you want to go?” I asked.

  “Back to the scene of the crime, of course,” Danny answered with a grin.

  ****

  Peaceful Rest didn’t look any more peaceful in the hot afternoon sun than it had earlier. The stained patches of grass had been removed to the lab. In their place were divots of sandy soil. The oak tree was similarly scarred, bark and branches removed for analysis. Even the bushes had been trimmed. It looked like someone had randomly torn off bits of the landscape. There was nothing left for us to see outside, so we headed inside to the security office.

  A trim security guard was monitoring a bank of small screens that flipped between the various cameras. Every few seconds the images scrolled. I could see the door from the crime scene, then another door exactly like it. An instant before the image shifted, I saw a woman with a long blond ponytail come into frame.

  “Can you get that one back?” I asked the guard. “I think that’s our missing nurse.”

  “This one?” he asked, bringing the image up on the largest of the monitors. “Nah, that’s Leslie. She works split shift, comes on at four. It gives her time to take classes in the morning.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be, it’s an easy mistake. Brenda and Leslie both have that long Barbie doll hair. Put ’em in scrubs, and it’s a hard to tell them apart, especially on these monitors.”

  Something about what he said startled Danny. I gave him a questioning look but he was thinking too hard to notice.

  “When you pulled the monitor tapes for us, did you pull the crime scene or all of the doors?” he asked the guard.

  “Just your crime scene, there’s seven doors in all if you count the loading bay. That’s a lot of tape.”

  “Can you pull all of the doors for us, but for the time period right after the attacks, say from 5:30 until 7:30?” His voice masked his excitement. I knew he was on to something, but I couldn’t think of what. “Are the key card details ready yet?”

  “They’re over by the fax machine. I sent them to your office a minute ago.” The guard pointed and Danny practically ran over.

  “Have you got a highlighter?” he asked.

  The guard handed him one.

  Danny sat down opening the reports.

  Over his shoulder, all I could read was a three-column chart of numbers and times. Danny ignored me and asked, “Wait, how does this work? Can you explain these to me?”

  “Sure thing, column one is the employee I.D., see there’s Brenda there, number 2683; column two is your door number, and the third column is the time.”

  “How far forward does this go?”

  “It doesn’t stop until we pulled it at 9 o’clock.”

  Danny muttered ‘thanks’ and dove into the pages. He flipped past the time of the attack, scanning quickly down the page.

  “What are you looking for, partner?” I asked eager to be in on the secret.

  “We’ve been going backwards. We assumed Marie escaped, and then the attack happened as part of that escape. What if it went the other way, what if the point of the attack was to get Marie?” His voice trailed off as his finger traced down the column. “There!”

  He had stopped at the missing nurse’s card number, 2683, opening door number 5S, at 6:15 in the morning. “Why was she opening the door when her friends were still dying under the oak tree?” Danny took the print out over to the guard’s desk. “Can you pull this up for me?”

  The guard nodded and began manipulating the machines in front of him. Danny was almost dancing from foot-to-foot. He looked over at me with a smile of pure self-satisfaction.

  “Barbie doll hair, Mal, that’s the thing. The nurse was a thin white woman with long blond hair. Now where have you seen someone like that recently?”

  It hit me, a woman who looked like Barbie, down to the empty eyes and the vapid smile. “Lisa at the WPL.”

  “Exactly.” The guard pulled his attention back to the largest monitor. The black and white image showed a woman with a long blond ponytail coming into frame. She kept her back to the camera. All we could see was her long blond hair and a thin bit of skin where her uniform shirt rose out of her pants. Even her hands were kept out of view. She used the key card to open the door and went quickly inside.

  The guard jogged the film backward then paused it. “That’s not Brenda.”

  “Are you sure?” Danny asked him.

  “Positive. Brenda has a tattoo across the small of her back. It’s her favorite song. You know the music, like notes on lines.” He checked the time stamp in the corner of the screen against the logs. “If it wasn’t for the tattoo I’d say it was her, but that tattoo is famous. She showed it off every chance she got.”

  Unfortunately, the key cards didn’t cover opening doors from the outside. It took us another two hours of watching tapes to find the mystery woman taking Marie out of the facility. We left Peaceful Rest with a copy of the evidence, and Danny talking a mile a minute.

  “They wait for the nurses to come out, grab them, and take the key card and the uniform. The lovely and psycho Lisa puts on the uniform, takes the key, and goes in for Marie. She takes her out to where her friends are waiting. Marie drops the doll when she sees the gore.”

  “Unless Marie isn’t the victim.”

  “Even if she wanted to go with them, it still works. It just means that Marie dropped the doll deliberately to spook you.” He grinned widely. Danny pointed the car toward downtown, into the middle of rush hour traffic.

  “Where are we going?”

  “I thought we might stop by the lab, see if they’ve got anything yet.” Danny said, excited about the case.

  The traffic moved fast enough for me to think some god somewhere was looking out for me. We made it to the city medical complex without too much trouble. The morgue was in the basement. The forensic labs were upstairs. I wasn’t sure which way we should go, but Danny didn’t even wait for the elevator. He headed down, taking the stairs two at a time.

  The main room of the morgue was an open space with rows of tall silver cabinets that held bodies instead of files. The silver in the cabinets kept the bodies quiet. No one knew why it worked, but it did. Werewolf victims, demons, and all sorts of nasties were kept confined by the silver doors. Although it wasn’t written in any of the literature, silver doors and coffins kept bodies quiet for me too. It wasn’t until we passed into the second room, the operating room, that I could hear the low whispering of the dead. It sounded like someone had left a radio on in another room, voices saying things I couldn’t quite make out. When I’d first started using my abilities, the noise had grown into a buzz that made me blackout. Now I could decipher it or focus on one voice. Today I did neither. I was done being a death witch for the day.

  Dr. Mohahan had laid the body parts out on long steel table. He was trying t
o fit them together like a jigsaw puzzle. One table held the mostly intact upper body of the woman; the other table had the head and arm of the man. Dr. Mohahan was holding a severed thigh, examining it to see which body it fit. The ends were so badly chewed that the remaining centerpiece of meat was barely recognizable as a limb. He didn’t bother to cover either of them when we walked into the room.

  “Detective Mors, I could sure use your help today,” the doctor said cheerfully setting the thigh down next to the male body. “Whatever did this seems to think I like brainteasers.”

  “Sorry, I’ve already had the pleasure. You’re on your own,” I returned but then pointed that the thigh went on the left side. He nodded and moved it over.

  “Tell us what you know, doc.” Danny asked.

  “What I know or what I think? It’s still too early to know anything, so I’ll tell you what I think.” He draped both bodies and started to wash his hands. “I think this is the first lycanthrope attack of my career, but at the same time I’m not sure.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because of Jane Doe,” he said as if that summed everything up. “Jane arrived this afternoon, dead from blunt trauma or heart failure. I’m not sure which yet. The thing is Jane has the same type of bites I see on these two, but lycanthropes don’t eat their victims after they’re dead.”

  “Can we see Jane?” Danny asked.

  The doctor led us out to the main room and pulled open one of the drawers. I was across the room when the silver door opened, but the force hit me hard enough that I stumbled. It was power, raw power and hurt, anguish. Fear and loathing wrapped up in it too. I felt like someone had punched me in the stomach, completely knocking the wind out of me. I gasped for breath inarticulately when what I really wanted was to scream.

  I watched Danny and Dr. Mohahan talking, pulling back the cover over the corpse. Danny looked shocked, but I couldn’t hear him talking over the rush of power. I lurched into a chair and concentrated on breathing. My thoughts focused on telling them to shut the drawer, but I couldn’t waste the breath. It was the same feeling from Marie’s apartment, the feeling of drowning on dry land.

  “Shut the drawer.” The voice was thick and gravelly. Both men jumped, but only Danny looked at me. I was still choking, trying to breathe. Dr. Mohahan just stared, but Danny finally got it, slamming the drawer closed so fast a bit of sheet stuck out the side. The instant the silver door shut, I could breathe again.

  “Thanks,” I whispered, my voice shaky.

  “Who spoke?” Dr. Mohahan’s voice was just as unsteady.

  “I think it was that one.” Danny pointed to a sheet-covered corpse covered. “You all right, Mal?”

  “I’m getting there.”

  Dr. Mohahan replaced the sheet on the corpse and shook his head. “I’m sorry, but that woman has been dead for the last three days, I don’t understand.”

  Danny cut him off. “Is there a soda machine nearby?”

  I shook my head. “I’ll be okay, just let me get my breath. Madame Marie is pissed about being dead.”

  “You could tell who she was? Without seeing her or touching her? And you made a three-day-old corpse talk?” I could tell the good doctor’s head was spinning. “What else can you do?”

  I didn’t even try to answer his question. Instead, I sat meekly while Danny gave him Marie’s details. I was curious to how she had died, why she had bite marks but wasn’t eaten. Normally I would have touched her corpse to get that information, but I wasn’t willing to risk opening that drawer again ever. If that choking, breath-stealing feeling was how voodoo felt I hoped I’d never have to feel it again.

  Chapter Nine

  Outside the skies opened up like the end of the world. Rain hitting the streets caused waves of steam to rise up from the pavement. The inside of the car felt stuffy, the air conditioner only blew hot air making it worse. The oppressive air weighed me down almost as much as my guilt. I’d been detached all afternoon and angry that I didn’t get to take the day off. I should have been caught up in the case. Then when we found something I could help with, it overwhelmed me too much for me to do anything.

  I turned to face Danny in the driver’s seat of the car. “I’m sorry I lost it.”

  “Everyone has bad days, Mal. The trick is not to have too many of them together.”

  “I feel like this whole week has been a disaster.”

  “When you deal with a zombie attack on Tuesday and another one on Wednesday, it’s hard to have a good week. You busy this weekend? Emma has a competition on Saturday. You could come watch, or join us for church and dinner?”

  “I’ll think about it. I’ve never seen Emma dance.” Emma was a champion Irish step dancer. She prided herself on her long bank of trophies.

  “She’s good. Scary good, if my family saw her they’d want to take her home to study in Ireland.” He didn’t look pleased about the thought and shook his head. “My family, now that’s a disaster.”

  The way he said family reminded me of Jakob watching the mass from home. “Hey, Jakob wants to come to church. Can you mention it to Father Sam, see if he could make it happen?”

  “Wait, the stiff is Catholic?”

  I nodded.

  “I knew he was good people. But, Mal, there’s a giant cross behind the altar, not to mention the altar itself and holy water everywhere, it would be like walking through a mine field.”

  “I know, but I have great faith in Father Sam,” I smiled. We hit a red light before the turn off to the Eclipse. “I think I’m going to walk from here.”

  “It’s pouring rain out. You’ll get drenched.” Danny looked at me like I was crazy.

  “No, I’ll get clean.” I opened the car door. “See you later,” I called over the rain. It felt cool on my skin, cleansing and crisp. I didn’t run. There was something indulgent and rebellious in walking slowly in a suit in the rain. When I got to the large circular driveway that marked the entrance of The Eclipse, I took off my shoes. The cement was smooth and warm under my feet, sending me back to a thousand memories from my childhood.

  The elevator upstairs was too cold, and I shivered, soaked through to my skin. I was grateful no one joined me on my ride up. I opened the door to my apartment. Jakob wasn’t waiting for me, but there was a note saying he had gone to run errands. I headed straight out to the terrace and the rain waiting for me.

  One of my walls is solid glass, but the rain coming down was hard enough that you couldn’t see the outside. I slipped outside and stood in the rain. I took off my suit coat and threw it inside. A minute later I noticed my pantyhose were torn, I took them off too. I should have gone inside, like a sensible adult. I tilted my head back and let the water run down my face. Ghosts did not attack sensible adults. I’d been out of sorts all day, and I felt bad about it, but in the privacy of my own home, I was entitled.

  The rain slowed down from above while a mist rose up from below. It was thick and cold. I started to shiver, then felt arms around me. When I looked up Jakob was holding me, kissing my earlobe.

  “Have I ever told you how kissable your earlobe is?” he asked.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever heard that word, so no I don’t think you have.” I kissed him back, my tongue exploring his mouth. I was shocked to find the tiniest bit of fang, my tongue played over the sharp point before I broke the kiss to explore his neck.

  “I saw you from downstairs, you looked lonely,” he said while I kissed around raindrops.

  “We’re twelve stories up.”

  He made a noise that could have been a moan and could have been agreement - I wasn’t sure. His head moved down to my breasts, kissing them through the wet fabric. I put my arms around him, confused but not concerned until I realized what he wasn’t wearing. “You’re naked!” I shouted and jumped back.

  He looked at me with a brilliant grin, his blue eyes shining. “Clothes don’t come along when you turn into a mist. Luckily, I left some here,” he smiled and stepped back toward me.

>   “Oh-no,” I said, shaking my head. “Stay right where you are, you seductive naked vampire. I expect a full explanation for this before you get another kiss.” I crossed my arms and tried to look firm.

  “As you wish.” He came behind me and moved me over to the edge of the balcony. He pointed down to the visitor spaces in the front of the building. “I parked my car there. I saw you up here. You looked rather lovely so I came up as fast as I could. Now may I kiss you?” he teased.

  “You saw me from twelve stories below, turned into mist, and traveled up here for a kiss? How can I say no?” I teased back. He spun us around so his back, not mine, was against the stone balcony. I felt him press against me and desperately wanted what would come next. He felt so right, better than anything I had felt all day. He kissed down the center of my body, unbuttoning buttons as he went. When he reached my waistband, he knelt and slowly peeled my skirt and underwear off my lower body. I stepped out of them feeling the rain drop gently onto parts of me that usually only felt water in the shower. I reveled in the feeling, in being exposed to the water. He grinned up at me, kissing me softly in those hidden places.

  His hands stroked my hips, exploring my body while his face pressed hard against me, his tongue rubbing the mound of curly hair between my legs. I leaned back, thrusting myself against him. His hand stole between my legs, his fingers tenderly entering me.

  My body opened to his caress as my attention narrowed to the pleasure he gave me. I forgot the rain, my day; I forgot the world as the passion pulsed through my body. A moment later, his hands caught me and lifted me, joining our bodies together.

  His firm flesh stroked that place inside of me that brought so much ecstasy. I felt the pressure begin to build, that knot of sensation driving me to call his name over and over. He answered me; his words in that thick German that gave even more power to the feeling inside me. Finally, sensation claimed me, and a moment later his own pleasure echoed mine.

  We stood there, holding each other in the rain for a minute. His body slipped from me as he kissed me gently and led me inside. Half way up the stairs to the bedroom, I remembered my clothes. Coming back in with them in a soggy pile, I got a shock.