I wiped my shoes on the carpet just inside the door, wiping them hard, to remove any trace evidence. It wasn’t good enough. I should have on booties, but I/we needed to see/scent/taste-this-on-the-air. I stepped around the blood spatter and squatted over the body to look at the neck. The cut was higher on one side than the other, clean, a single cut, like the kind a sword makes in the hands of someone who knows how to use it. And the killer’s scent, buried beneath the stink of blood and bowel, was both unknown and familiar, hauntingly so. I swallowed hard, trying to figure out how everything that had happened fit together. And it didn’t, especially the part about someone trying to kill me in the middle of vamp HQ. I could almost put the other stuff together, but that part fit nowhere. I had random puzzle pieces with no matching edges.
“Derek. Record.” I heard a soft click and knew he had activated a recording device. “Killer was likely male, killed left-handed, but he knows how to use a blade, how to fight, so he might be right-handed and using his left to throw us off. I’m pretty sure this was done with a single stroke, with a sword. Blade got trapped in the spine and he tore the head off to free it, so he was covered in blood when he finished here. He’s strong. Strong like a vamp.”
“You think a Mithran did this?” a female voice asked behind me. It was the kind of question a lawyer asked, confirmatory and just a bit disbelieving. It was Adelaide.
I swallowed before I replied, pushing down on Beast, holding her beneath me. I am alpha, I thought at her. She hissed and twitched her tail at me as she padded away. I got a breath without thinking prey. And meat. “Few vamps would have wasted the blood,” I said, hearing the harsh tone in the harsh words. “But maybe this time, a vamp did. Punishment, maybe?” For a job well bungled?
I holstered my weapons and backed out of the room, stepping in the same places I’d used before. In the doorway, I pulled off my boots and handed them to Adelaide. “The cops will be ticked that I entered the room. They’ll need my boots for trace evidence. I know exactly where I stepped, so when they get into a pissing contest about it, let me know.
“I need to see the other guy. His partner.”
In the room two doors down, I found Tattooed Dude, lying on the floor under a table. I thought he was asleep when I walked in. Then I thought he was dead. And then I realized that he was breathing, his head was still in place, and he was staring at the ceiling. I bent over him and sniffed, seeing the marks on his neck. Someone had been drinking from him. Recently. And they hadn’t been gentle about it. But the scary thing was that there was no scent signature on the wounds or in the room. I didn’t know how that was possible unless someone was carrying a don’t-smell-me charm. Was there even such a thing? Had to be.
“Get Edmund in here,” I said to the small group of people following me. “I want to know everything this guy knows. I’m going to security.”
I pushed through the gaggle of blood-servants and out the doorway. Walking in my sock feet, I took the elevator down to the large security/electronic monitoring/conference area. The room was nearly empty. The bronze light fixture and track lights were dim, shadowing the corners of the room. The oval table was nearly bare, and the air smelled of coffee and Krispy Kreme donuts, the sweet scent from a box open on the table. The huge ceiling monitor was lit, showing twenty-seven camera angles from my newest upgrade, but as I watched, one view expanded to fill half of the screen.
“Footage isolated,” a voice said. To the side, at the control monitors of the security system, Wrassler was standing behind a man wearing fatigues. Angel Tit looked up as I entered and gave me a faint nod, watching to see my reaction at finding him here.
“I brought him so none of ours had control of the system,” Wrassler said, which was good thinking. Angel was one of Derek’s men, and he’d been caught with his hand in the cookie jar once. He’d been working to rehabilitate himself, and while he wasn’t worried at seeing me, and didn’t stink of guilt, he was concerned. Being in charge of the electronics while in the middle of a crisis was a huge step forward to acceptance for him. I inclined my head to show I acknowledged all that; his expression of concern melted away.
Angel pointed to the monitor. “This one shows the hallway outside the interrogation room holding Jimmy Joe James. The guard looked down the hallway, as if called, and someone moving with vamp-speed appears for a moment, enters the room, and closes the door.” The footage showed real-time speed as the guard walked away for a moment, still visible in the camera, but with his back turned. I caught a flash of darkness, a brighter light, and then the guard walked back, up and down the hallway, keeping watch. Moments later, when the guard was facing away, the vamp raced from the room. He’d been only a blur entering, then leaving.
“Can you show it in slow-mo?”
“Yeah. But it doesn’t help. The guy was wearing a hoodie with the hood up, and jeans and sneakers.”