Angel tapped some keys and I saw the same segment slowed down, the digital feed jerky. The guard walked away, the man in dark clothes raced in. Later he raced out. Something looked wrong. “Play the first and the last part again, the killer arriving and leaving.”
The segment started in the dead time, when the guard pivoted and walked down the hallway. The interrogation room door opened. The shadowy figure showed, entering the room. Yeah. He was wearing a hoodie, and it was pulled low over this face, his only distinguishing features his broad shoulders and narrow waist. Angel clacked some keys and the same figure appeared leaving the room. I said, “One more time, this time cut out all the empty time. When the guard walks, I want to see the coming and going of our killer, as slow as you can make it.”
I watched the footage. “Again,” I said. “Freeze it with him on-screen, entering the room.” The footage backed up and rolled forward to the correct digital frames, and froze. There were two frames, both blurred, but one showed what I wanted. “Print me out a still.” I pointed. “Of that one.”
A heartbeat later I heard a printer buzzing. “Okay, now the killer exiting.” The digital shot appeared on-screen, and just as I’d thought, something was wrong and different.
When he left, the guy was wearing different shoes. I took both stills and studied the blurred photos. I pointed. “Entering, he’s wearing brown lace-up shoes and carrying a bundle under his left arm. This shadow here might be a sword strapped to his waist. Exiting, he’s wearing white running shoes. Maybe different clothes. And the sword is in a different position.”
“Okay,” Angel Tit said, but his tone added a “so what?” to the agreement.
“He changed shoes. Probably changed clothes too. Standing in the only blood-free place he could have.”
“In the doorway,” Wrassler said, “where you stood and wiped your boots.”
I huffed out a breath. “Yeah. I’m an idiot.”
CHAPTER 9
“Not Human,” I Said. “Deal with It.”
My idiocy summed up Jodi Richoux’s thoughts nicely when she learned what I’d done. We were alone in the interrogation room where Imogene had been kept. “You contaminated my crime scene. You willfully walked into a blood-splattered crime scene to inspect a body. Not to check to see if he was still alive, which I could have understood and accepted. But you went in to look over a dead body.” The last two words were nearly shouted. Jodi was not happy.
She stood in front of me, petite, blond hair bobbed at her jaw, fists on her hips, pushing back the dark gold business jacket that made her look stylish and tough. Tonight she wore her badge on her belt, and her gun in sight, clipped to a simple holster at her waist. “Talk to me, Jane. I need to know what happened.”
I opened my mouth and closed it with a click of teeth. How could I admit to her that Beast had wanted a good look/smell/taste of air? I sat back in the chair, thinking about what I was about to do, and could see no other way out. However, there was no reason I couldn’t establish some control of the info. “Off the record,” I said. “Take it or leave it.”
Jodi considered my requirement. “Unless it impacts a crime, I’m okay with that.”
It was better than I expected. I nodded. “I’m not human.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
“I’m a Cherokee skinwalker.”
“What the hell is a skinwalker?” she snarled, in a fair imitation of a predator herself.
I gave her the short form. “I can take the shape and form of animals of my general size, provided I have enough genetic material to take a reading of it and copy it.”
“So?”
“So my sense of smell is good. Way better than human.”
“Keep going.”
“I should have been able to tell in the hallway that a dead body was on the other side of the door. Just by the smell. I should have been able to smell the blood. I should have been able to smell the perpetrator coming and going. I couldn’t. So I went inside. Stood over the body and smelled.”
Jodi sat in the chair beside me and said, “Go on.”
“I got a hint, but it wasn’t much. You know how, if you glimpse something in the next room, out of the corner of your eye, your brain instantly starts to make a picture out of it? Because our brains are pattern oriented?” She nodded. “Well, I do that with my sense of smell. And I got a hint of a vamp I’d smelled before.” I held her eyes with mine. “But I can’t place it. It’s been muffled, like with magic. And no, I didn’t know scent could be tampered with, but it can.”
“I’m listening.” Which was cop-speak for keep talking.