Deep Dark Secret (17 page)

The three of us split up to check the doors for the corresponding names. I hit pay dirt on the last door. All three women and one Jane Doe were stored within. Brigit used her stolen keycard to provide us access to the room. Inside, the room temperature was a good ten degrees cooler than the hall outside.

All the better to keep your corpses fresh with, my dear.

Built into the back wall were six metal cabinets. In the middle of the floor was a table on wheels, a light stand and an empty instrument tray. On one side of the room were several glass-paneled storage units containing everything from cotton balls and rubber gloves to scalpels and bone saws. I knew what was in each cabinet because the doors contained a meticulous list of the contents.

The antiseptic smell was stronger in here than in the hall as well. I opened one of the storage cabinets and handed Nolan and Brigit each a pair of rubber surgical gloves before putting on my own. I didn’t need us leaving anything behind that might prove we’d been in this room. Fingerprints in the elevator and the exterior hall were one thing—anyone could get there and likely dozens of people a day touched those surfaces. A poorly placed fingerprint on a body, on the other hand, could lead to some unpleasant implications.

The middle two drawers on the back wall were unmarked, which led me to believe they must be empty. I started with Trish Keller, who was in the top left-hand drawer. Lucky for me and my stunted growth, the top drawer came out at chest height, so I didn’t need to find a stepladder to get a good look at the body.

She was sheathed in an opaque white bag, which I unzipped to reveal her naked, blue-gray body. Nolan made a small noise, but Brigit leaned over my shoulder to get a better view.

“
Ew
,” she said, summarizing my own feelings with perfect brevity.

“Just think, Bri, you could have looked like this too if I hadn’t intervened.”

“Thanks.”

I’d been teasing, but her gratitude sounded genuine. When she’d first been turned, she wanted to kill me for it. Now she seemed legitimately thankful.

“Nolan, can you find me the chart for Trish Keller?” I pointed to the door where several metal clipboards were sorted into their own divider slots next to the magnetic swipe pad. There were six slots and only four folders, confirming my suspicion about the empty drawers.

He came back and tried to hand me the clipboard, but I was too busy scanning Trish’s body for any sign of partially healed vampire bites or other supernatural residue.

“Whatcha lookin’ for?” he asked.

“See if there’s anything unusual in her blood work. Elevated levels of adrenaline. Higher than usual concentrations of hormones. A higher than usual amount of testosterone.” As I listed each telltale sign of shapeshifter blood, Nolan replied in the negative. Trish’s blood was clean, with the exception of high blood alcohol and traces of cocaine.

Maybe it was naive, but I figured girls at Ivy League schools were less likely to have hard drugs in their systems. College was certainly different than I gleaned from watching
Animal House
and
Road Trip
, if doing lines of blow was more common than doing keg stands. If Gabriel wasn’t responsible for Trish’s death, maybe her party lifestyle had contributed to her murder. It was definitely something to consider.

I zipped her bag and continued the search, next checking Angie Ferris, who was rooming downstairs from Trish. Same thing, no signs of bites or violence, nothing weird in her blood. By the time we’d pulled out Misty’s body I was giving up hope of finding proof that would clear Gabriel. These girls had died of something natural. Sure, it was still murder, but their killer didn’t appear to be anything more than a normal, messed-up human.

We stowed Misty’s body, and I was about to call it a night, when I looked at Jane Doe’s locker above Misty’s. Why was this girl in here with them? The other three made sense, because they were a part of an ongoing investigation, but what about the unknown?

“Nolan, grab Jane Doe’s chart for me, please.”

He didn’t ask any questions, just went to grab the clipboard as I opened the final cabinet and pulled the sliding tray out.

The first thing I noticed was potentially more disturbing than anything we’d seen with the other girls thus far. It wasn’t anything about the condition of her body—she looked like most dead girls do. You know…pasty, cold, generally corpsey. What creeped me out about Jane Doe was something much more mundane.

I
knew
her.

I didn’t know her name, but the mousy brown hair and the chubby roundness of her features came screaming back to me. We’d locked eyes across a dim office, right before she’d jumped out a third-floor window at the museum earlier that week. But I knew perfectly well the fall hadn’t killed her. I’d checked for a body.

Yet this was the same girl.

“Nothin’ in the blood,” Nolan told me before I asked.

“I don’t want to know about her blood.”

“Whatcha wanna know?”

“What’s her date of death?”

“Uhh.” He paged through the sheets until he found what he was looking for. “Says she died ‘bout two weeks ‘go.”

“No.” I shook my head and took the clipboard from him. “That can’t be right. I saw this girl a few days ago, and she was very alive then.” But he wasn’t mistaken. The Medical Examiner clearly believed her body had been dead for over two weeks. It had only been found the previous day, however.

“If she’s been dead for two weeks, shouldn’t she, like, be rotting or something?” Brigit queried.

She had a good point. There should be more decomposition happening, but the girl appeared to be well-preserved. Curiouser and curiouser. Then I remembered something else about her from the night we’d encountered one another.

Since Nolan was now the one standing closest to the body, I asked, “Can you unzip the bag so I can see her shoulder?”

He pursed his lips and wrinkled his nose but didn’t argue with me.

If this was the same girl I’d encountered at the museum, she should show some sign of the gunshot I’d landed on her shoulder. I needed to know if it really was the same girl and not my mind playing tricks on me.

Nolan peeled back the body bag to expose Jane Doe’s bare white shoulders. All three of us leaned over the corpse, and I half-expected her to open her eyes and stare back at us. But nothing happened. And there were no scars on her shoulder or anywhere else on her body.

“What the hell?” I said, unable to understand why there was no evidence of the wound. I wasn’t willing to accept I was wrong about it being the same girl. The resemblance was too uncanny.

When we pulled back, the dead girl’s eyelid had opened, and she leered at us with her one constricted pupil, her face contorted in a sinister, frozen wink that was more creepy than comical. Brigit, Nolan and I all stepped back in unison. I knew bodies did messed-up things postmortem, but it was hard not to imagine that she was staring at us. I was suddenly all too aware that we were in the middle of a room full of corpses, and the heebie-jeebies set in full force.

I did the only thing I could think to do. I zipped the bag back up, pushed the tray back in and closed the cabinet with a final, satisfying click. Maybe it was just my imagination, but I swore the rank of decay was hanging heavy in the air, and I feared it had sunk into my clothes, hair and pores. I would spend hours in the shower washing the smell of death off me.

When we left, Brigit gave the smiling desk clerk his card back.

None of us said a word.

My original plan had been to go straight from the Medical Examiner’s office to Columbia to talk to Mayhew again. But with the smell of rotten corpse clinging to me, I needed a hot shower and a change of clothes before I went anywhere.

There were any number of places I could have stopped between the financial district and the Columbia campus, but I still felt like I reeked of death and had corpse stink oozing out of my sweat. The only shower that would do was my own.

When I unlocked my door, I almost tripped over Desmond’s work shoes. Kicking them out of the way, I shucked my boots off next to his. The water was running in the bathroom, so Desmond had probably gone to the gym after work and just gotten home. If he’d been in a hurry to go from the office to a workout, it would explain his haphazard shoe disposal. Of the two of us, he was almost always the neater one.

Who was I kidding? He was
always
the neater one.

I contemplated waiting for him to finish in the shower, but the stench wafting off me was too much to bear. Stripping in the middle of the hallway, I stalked into the bathroom and climbed into the steaming shower stall. Desmond’s brown hair and olive skin looked especially dark against my garish pink tub and rose-print wallpaper.

He also seemed surprised to see me.

“To what do I owe the pleasure?” he asked, his voice slipping into the husky growl he reserved for bedroom conversation.

I would have loved to act out some slippery, soapy, shower-sex fantasy with him right then, but it wasn’t meant to be. He was a werewolf, and his sense of smell was second to none, even when he was in his human form. The moment he stooped to kiss me he recoiled, his nose wrinkled with disgust.

“What? You don’t like my new perfume?”

“
Eau de Putrification
? God, Secret, what
is
that?”

“Death.” I should have known he’d be able to smell it on me. It was bad enough that the wolves could smell vampires on me, but real human death had its own distinctive, lingering quality. I’d been right to shower.

Desmond put his hands on my waist, but it wasn’t a come-on. He pushed me past him so the full brunt of the showerhead was angled in my face. The water was so hot I thought it might burn off the top layer of my skin. I turned it hotter. To Desmond’s credit he didn’t bail out to get away from the smell. Instead he opted to empty half a bottle of green-apple-scented shampoo onto my head and made a desperate effort to scrub the stink out of my hair by sheer force of will.

In spite of the unpleasant reason for my being there, it felt fantastic to have him wash my hair. He applied just the right amount of pressure on my scalp and wrapped my hair into a thick tail to rinse the shampoo free. Then he handed me a loofah and ducked out of the shower.

I was impressed he’d lasted that long.

A good fifteen minutes later my skin was scrubbed pink, I’d washed my hair again, and we were out of pomegranate body gel. I still detected the lingering touch of old death when I took a deep breath, but I always smelled a little dead.

Desmond was dressed and waiting for me in the kitchen with a pre-warmed glass of AB negative.

“Well…” He handed me the glass. “Now you smell like a rotting fruit salad. I guess it’s an improvement.”

“Did they teach you how to woo a lady at charm school? You’re excellent at it.”

“You mean we don’t club women over the head and drag them back to our caves? Hmm.” He swallowed a mouthful of water. “We wolfmen must have missed that lesson.”

“Lucas sure did,” I added with an indignant huff.

Desmond wrapped his hand around the back of my neck and kissed me. I hadn’t been expecting it. His lips were warm and velvety soft in spite of the harsh dry air. I made a mental note to send the folks at ChapStick a thank-you letter. He didn’t push for more than a kiss, just let the gesture stand as its own entity. And what a kiss it was. My knees turned to gelatin, and I sagged into him, still clumsily holding my glass of blood in one hand while caressing his smooth cheek with the other.

He pulled back, playfully licking my swollen lower lip and sending tingles from my forehead to my toes.

“You still stink,” he said with a roguish smirk, kissing the tip of my nose.

“Yeah well…” There was no obvious comeback, so I went for an old classic. “Your face still stinks.”

“Real smooth.”

“Shut up.”

I finished the blood and went to the bedroom to get dressed. This time I didn’t bother with college-girl chic. I was going to talk to Mayhew as the real me, and if I needed to get rough to get answers, I wanted to be dressed for it. My outfit consisted of leather pants, one of Desmond’s Yankees shirts that was loose enough to hide the knife tucked into the waistband of my pants, and Dominick’s leather jacket to conceal the SIG and its holster.

Some people wore camouflage to go on a hunt. I wore leather and my boyfriend’s T-shirt.

Desmond gave me a once-over when I sat on the couch to pull my boots on.

“So
that’s
why all my shirts smell like you. I was starting to think I was going crazy.”

“You are going crazy. Every day you stay with me proves it.”

There was a brief pause as he sipped his water and digested the hard truth of my words. In the end he gave a half shrug and smiled at me. “Then I guess I’m crazy.”

I don’t think my heart had jumped as hard when he’d told me he loved me. Since the situation with Lucas had taken a southerly dive this week, I’d been holding my breath for the moment Desmond decided he was fed up with being one point in a ridiculously scalene love triangle and bailed for good. I’d been sure the time had come when he walked out, yet here he was in my apartment, looking like he was always going to be with me.

I let out a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding.

“I don’t deserve you,” I admitted, both to myself and to him.

He crossed the room and cupped the back of my head, tilting it back slightly so I was looking at him. “We all deserve exactly what we get. Good or bad. My dad used to tell me that.”

“You never talk about him.”

“I do when it matters.”

“What happened to him?”

Desmond dropped his hand and sat on the arm of the loveseat. “He died.” He was looking at his hands instead of at me. I didn’t push him further, hoping he’d offer the rest of the story on his own. When I thought he was about to change the subject, he said, “You already know he was Jeremiah’s second, right?”

“The Desmond to his Lucas, so to speak.”

“Yeah. They were a lot like us, and in some ways a lot different. Dad met Jeremiah later in life. He grew up in a Southern wolf pack, actually, on the edge of the western territories. He moved east in his late teens, and his family had to appeal to the king for their right to come into the territory. At the time, Lucas’s grandfather Gerald was the Eastern pack king. He was grooming his son for the crown, so Jeremiah was there for the appeal. There wasn’t a bond between them, not like with me and Lucas, but they liked each other instantly.