Jodi and I stood in a small crowd in the hallway outside Leo’s office as Peter worked. The reek of blood, buckets of it, starting to go bad, was sickly sweet. Leo stared at the dead woman, Kemnebi at his side. There was no sign of Katie, but Leo looked wan and drained—pun fully intended.
Peter at work consisted of standing and studying the body. For the first time, I allowed my eyes to linger on Safia and catalogue her injuries. Safia was golden skinned, black haired, dark eyed, a small woman but with long legs and delicate fingers. The henna tats on her hands and feet swirled up her limbs to stop at her knees and midway between her elbow and shoulder. If weres shifted like I did, then they lost all body paint in a shift, making the tats expensive in terms of time. If the paradigm held true, the tats also proved that she hadn’t shifted tonight.
Kemnebi was staring at her, grief and horror on his face. He closed his eyes and his body went still for a moment, hunting-predator still, and when he opened them, all emotion was gone from his face. He stared at the scene as if he looked over the corpse of a stranger. But I had seen the vulnerability and anguish.
Her clothes were bloody. She lay on blood-soaked carpet, saturated and squishy beneath her. Her throat was gone, ripped away in three-claw tears, revealing her cervical spine and more about tendons and vessels and muscles than I needed to know. There were puncture marks on her chest between breast and shoulder. Defensive wounds showed on her knuckles; her fingernails were stained with blood and tissue. Hair was caught in the wound, blond like Katie’s. Or maybe my assumption that Katie killed her was faulty. Maybe a human had done the dirty deed, or a vamp, or werewolf. And Katie came upon the scene later. But it didn’t look good for Katie.
Safia’s abdomen at her waist had been gored, ripped into, the descending aorta pulled free, and savaged. It was the work of a large, fanged predator. Likely Katie. I parted my lips and breathed in through my open mouth. The stink of blood and big-cat was overwhelming. The coroner opened his bag at his side, set a plastic sheet under his knees, and bent over Safia.
Peter Richoux had light brown hair and fair skin with a smattering of freckles across his nose that made him look much younger than his actual age, and the perplexity on his face as he studied the corpse subtracted several more years, making him look all of twelve.
He pulled a digital pocket recorder and murmured into it the location, time, date, and the condition of the body when he found it. Kneeling beside Safia, the recorder on a thong around his neck, he opened a black bag and removed a small temperature and humidity monitor that he set on the floor. He took out a cylinder, screwed open its top, removed a long, slender thermometer with a metal tip on the end. He made a tiny cut on Safia’s side, over her liver, with a scalpel, and inserted the thermometer several inches into the cut, checked his watch, again noted the time. He began checking for signs of lividity or rigor. I had seen forensics workups a number of times in my years as a PI and a vamp hunter, but never on a human-looking girl who had been transformed into meat and blood.
He was about five minutes into his practiced routine when Peter stopped and looked around. “Anybody know what the normal body temperature of a were-cat is? When she’s human? And do they form rigor like a human? This is my first were, here, y’all. And it’s not like there are manuals on this species yet.”
Leo turned toward his were-cat guest, his demeanor stating that Kemnebi was the only one capable of providing an answer, and distancing himself from the questioning. The cops in the room looked the African man over, taking in his robes, checking for signs of blood spatter, and calculating his relationship with the deceased. Tension almost crackled in the air, though Kemnebi had no emotion on his face and nothing in his voice when he said, “We stiffen in death just as humans do. Her normal resting temperature is thirty-nine degrees.”
I figured he meant Celsius. Peter pulled out a fancy electronic device like a PDA, only with more bells and whistles, punched some numbers on the keypad and said, “One oh two resting temp.” He looked at the thermometer and his other equipment, punched in some more numbers, and said, “Current temp indicates victim has been dead approximately two hours. Give or take a half hour.”
I spoke into my mike. “Angel. Focus on footage from one hundred fifty-five minutes ago. Find out where everyone was. Make a chart. Note where everyone is at ninety minutes ago. Pull the feed focused on the doors of private rooms and bathrooms. Whoever did this got bloody and needed to shower and change.”
“On it, Legs.”
At least until the DS arrived, which was going to be a good four more hours, meaning after sunrise, Jodi was in charge. She stared at me hard, her cop face on, irritated and anything but deferent, even when she transferred the look to Leo. “There’s a blood trail from the body, and if your people,” she shot a look to me and back, “hadn’t trampled it and contaminated the crime scene, we might be able to pinpoint the killer tonight. As it is, this is going to take a long time to process.”
Leo nodded once, inscrutable and royal, as if giving her permission to continue. I just shrugged. I wasn’t a cop. She had her job; I had mine. My body language must have communicated my thoughts because Jodi’s eyes narrowed and she said, “According to the guys looking over the security footage, Katie was seen running down the hallway on this floor. She was the only person—including the vic, so far—caught on film in this hallway the entire night. Until we know different, I want Katie downtown, under wraps, for questioning.”
“That will not be possible,” Leo said. He looked elegant and urbane and ... clean. Leo was blood free. He’d found a place to wash up before the cops arrived. Contamination of a prime witness was gonna tick Jodi off when she figured that out.