Obsidian Butterfly (ab-9) (6 page)

"The survivors are here."

My eyes widened. "What survivors?"

He looked at me. "The survivors from the attacks." He opened his door, and I grabbed his arm, holding him in the car.

Edward turned slowly and looked at my hand on the bare skin of his arm. He looked at my hand a long time with his disapproval at the touch radiating from him, but it was a trick I'd pulled myself more than once. If the person makes it known that they don't want to be touched, most people that don't mean you violence will back off. I didn't back off. I dug my fingers into his skin, not to hurt, just to let him know he wasn't getting rid of me that easily.

"Talk to me, Edward. What survivors?"

He shifted his gaze from my hand to my face. I had an urge to snatch the sunglasses from his face but fought it. His eyes wouldn't show me anything anyway.

"I told you there were injured people." His voice was mild.

"No, you didn't. You made it sound like there were no survivors."

"My oversight," he said.

"My ass," I said. "I know you enjoy being mysterious, Edward, but it's getting tedious."

"Let go of my arm." He said it the way you'd say, hello, or nice day, no inflection at all.

"Will you answer my questions if I do?"

"No," he said, still with that same pleasant empty voice. "But if you make this a pissing contest, Anita, I'll feel compelled to make you let go. You wouldn't like that."

The voice never changed. There was even a slight smile to his mouth. But I let go, slowly, drawing back into my seat. If Edward said I wouldn't like it, I believed him.

"Talk to me, Edward."

He gave me a big ol' smile. "Call me Ted." Then the son of a bitch got out of the car. I sat in the car, watching him walk across the parking lot. He stopped at the edge with the hospital just across a small road from him. He took off the sunglasses, slipped one of the ear pieces into his shirt front, and stared back at the car, waiting.

It would serve him right if I didn't get out. It would serve him right if I went back to St. Louis and let him clean up his own mess. But I opened the door and got out. Why, you might ask. One, he'd asked me for a favor, and being Edward he'd reveal all in his own sadistic time. Two, I wanted to know. I wanted to know what had finally cut through all that coldness and scared him. I wanted to know. Curiosity is both a strength and a weakness. Which one this particular curiosity was wouldn't be answered for a while. I was betting on weakness.

SAINT LUCIA HOSPITAL was big and one of the few buildings of any size in Albuquerque that I'd seen that didn't have a southwest theme to it. It was just big and blocky, generic hospital. Maybe they didn't expect the tourists to see the hospital. Lucky tourists.

As hospitals go, it was nice, but it was still a hospital. A place I only go when things have gone wrong. The only up side this time was that it wasn't me or anyone I knew in the rooms.

We were in a long pale corridor with lots of closed doors, but there was a uniformed police officer in front of one of them. Call it a hunch, but I figured that was our room.

Edward walked up to the policeman and introduced himself. He was at his good ol' boy best, harmless and jovial, in a subdued hospital sort of way. They knew each other on sight which should have sped things up considerably.

The uniform looked past Edward to me. He looked young, but his eyes were cool and gray, cop eyes. You have to be on the job a while before your eyes go empty. But he looked at me too long and too intently. You could almost feel the testosterone rising to the surface. The challenging look said that either he was insecure in his own masculinity, his own copness, or that he hadn't been on the job all that long. Not a rookie, but not much beyond it either.

If he expected me to squirm under the scrutiny, he was going to be disappointed. I faced him, smiling, calm, eyes blank and close to bored. Passing inspection had never been my favorite thing.

He blinked first. "The lieutenant is inside. He wants to see her before she goes inside."

"Why?" Edward asked, voice still likable.

The officer shrugged. "I'm just following orders, Mr. Forrester. I don't question my lieutenant. Wait here." He opened the door and slipped inside without giving much of a glimpse inside. He shut the door behind him, not waiting for the weight and hinges to do it for him.

Edward was frowning. "I don't know what's going on."

"I do," I said.

He looked at me, raising an eyebrow, as if to say, go ahead.

"I'm a girl and technically a civilian. A lot of cops don't trust me to do the job."

"I vouched for you."

"Gee, Ed ... Ted, I guess your opinion doesn't carry as much weight as you thought it did."

He was still frowning at me with Edward's eyes when the door swung open. I was watching his face as he transformed into Ted. The eyes sparkled, the lips curved, the entire set of his face remade itself, as if it were a mask. His own personality vanished like magic. Watching the show this up close and personal made me shiver just a bit. The ease with which he switched back and forth was just plain creepy.

The man in the doorway was short, not many inches above me, maybe five foot six at best. I wondered if their police force didn't have a height requirement. His hair was a golden sun-streaked blond cut very short and close to his square-jawed face. He was tanned a nice soft gold, as if it were as dark a tan as his pale skin were capable of. First Donna, now the lieutenant. Didn't anyone sweat skin cancer here? He looked at me with green-gold eyes, the color of new spring leaves. They were beautiful eyes with long golden lashes and softened his face to an almost feminine appearance. Only the masculine jut of the jaw saved him from being one of those men who is beautiful instead of handsome. The jaw both ruined his face and saved it from perfection.

The eyes may have been lovely, but they weren't friendly. It wasn't even the coolness of cop eyes. It was hostile. Since I'd never met him before, it had to be the fact that I was a woman, a civilian, and/or an animator. He was either a chauvinist or superstitious. I wasn't sure which I preferred.

He let me have a nice long dose of glaring. I just gave blank face, waiting for him to get tired of it. I could stand there all day and be peacefully blank. Standing in a nice safe hospital corridor wasn't even close to the worst thing I'd had to do lately. It was always sort of peaceful when no one was trying to kill me.

Edward tried to break the stalemate. "Lieutenant Marks, this is Anita Blake. Chief Appleton called you about her." He was still using Ted's happy voice, but there was a set to his shoulders that was stiff and not so happy.

"You're Anita Blake." Lieutenant Marks managed to sound doubtful.

I nodded. "Yep."

His eyes narrowed. "I don't like civilians messing in my case." He jerked a thumb at Edward. "Forrester here has proven himself valuable." He pointed a finger at me. "You haven't."

Edward started to saysomething, but Marks but him off with a sharp movement of his hand. "No, let her answer for herself."

"I'll answer a question if you'll ask one," I said.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means you haven't asked a question yet, Lieutenant. You've just made statements."

"I don't need shit from some fucking zombie queen."

Ah, he was prejudiced. One mystery solved. "I was invited down here, Lieutenant Marks. I was invited to help you solve this case. Now if you don't want my help, fine, but I'll need someone from the city government to explain to my boss why the hell I got on a plane to New Mexico when I wasn't sure of my welcome."

"I don't treat you right and you run to powers that be, is that it?"

I shook my head. "Who got your panties in a twist, Marks?"

He frowned. "What?'

"Do I remind you of your ex-wife?'

"I'm married to my only wife." He sounded indignant.

"Congratulations. Is it the voodoo that I use to raise the dead? Are you nervous around the mystical arts?"

"I don't like black magic." He fingered the cross-shaped tie tack that was standard police issue almost everywhere, but somehow I thought Marks was serious about it.

"I don't do black magic, Marks." I drew on the silver chain around my neck until the crucifix spilled into the light. "I'm Christian, Episcopalian actually. I don't know what you've heard about what I do, but it's not evil."

"You would say that," he said.

"The state of my immortal soul is between God and myself, Lieutenant Marks. Judge not lest ye be judged yourself. Or do you skip that part and just keep the parts you like?"

His face darkened, and a vein in his forehead started to pulse. This level of anger, even if he was a right-winger Christian extremist, was over the top. "What in hell is behind that door to have you both so spooked?" I asked.

Marks blinked at me. "I am not spooked."

I shrugged. "Yeah, you are. You're all bent out of shape about the survivors. And you're taking it out on me."

"You don't know me," he said.

"No, but I know a lot of policemen, and I know when someone's scared."

He stepped close enough to me that if it had been a fight, I'd have stepped back, put space between us. Instead, I stood my ground. I wasn't really expecting the lieutenant to take a swing at me.

"You think you're so fucking tough?"

I blinked at him, close enough that if I'd risen on tiptoe, I could have kissed him. "I don't think, Lieutenant. I know."

He smiled at that, but not like he was happy. "You think you can take it, be my guest." He stepped to one side, making a sweeping motion towards the door.

I wanted to ask what was behind the door. What could possibly be so horrible that it had Edward and a police lieutenant this shaken? I stared at the closed door, smooth, hiding all its secrets.

"What are you waiting for, Ms. Blake? Go ahead. Open the door." I glanced back at Edward. "I don't suppose you'd give me a hint."

"Open the door, Anita."

I muttered, "Bastard," under my breath and opened the door.

THE DOOR DIDN'T LEAD directly into the room. It led into a small antechamber with another sealed, mostly glass door beyond. There was a hush of air circulating through the room as if the room had its own separate air supply. A man stood to one side wearing green surgical scrubs complete with little plastic booties over his feet, a mask hanging loose from his neck. He was tall and slender without looking weak. He was also one of the first New Mexicans that I'd met without a tan. He handed me a pile of scrubs. "Put this on."

I took the clothes. "Are you the doctor on this case?"

"No, I'm a nurse."

"You got a name?"

He gave a small smile. "Ben, I'm Ben."

"Thanks, Ben. I'm Anita. Why do I need the scrubs?"

"To guard against infection."

I didn't argue with him. My expertise was more in the line of taking lives, not preserving them. I'd bow to the experts. I put the scrubs over my jeans, tying the string tie as tight as it would go. The legs of the pants still bagged around my feet.

Ben the nurse was smiling. "We weren't expecting them to send us a policeman so ... petite."

I frowned at him. "Smile when you say that."

His smile brightened a flash of white teeth. The smile softened the face and made him seem less like Nurse Cratchet and more like a human being.

"And I'm not a cop."

His eyes flicked to the gun in it's shoulder holster. The gun was very black and very noticeable against the red shirt. "You're carrying a gun."

I slipped a short-sleeved shirt over my head, and the offending gun. "New Mexico law says I can carry as long as it's not concealed."

"If you're not a policeman, then why do you need the gun?"

"I'm a vampire executioner."

He held a long-sleeved gown out towards me. I slipped my arms through the sleeves. It tied in the back like most hospital gowns. Ben tied it for me. "I thought you couldn't kill a vampire with bullets."

"Silver bullets can slow them down, and if they're not too old or too powerful, blowing a hole in their brain or heart works. Sometimes," I added. Wouldn't want Ben to get the wrong idea and try to take out an intruding vamp with silver ammo and get munched because he trusted my opinion.

We had some trouble getting my hair up under the little plastic hair thing but finally managed it, though the thin ridge of elastic that held it in place scraped the back of my neck every time I moved my head. Ben tried to help mo with the surgical gloves, but I put them on myself, no problem.

He raised eyebrows at me. "You've put on gloves before." It wasn't a question.

"I wear them at crime scenes and when I don't want blood under my fingernails."

He helped me tie the mask around my neck. "You must see a lot of blood in your line of work."

"Not as much blood as you see, I bet." I turned with the mask over my mouth and nose. Only my eyes were left uncovered and real.

Ben looked down at me, and his face looked thoughtful. "I'm not a surgical nurse."

"What is your specialty?" I asked.

"Burn unit."

My eyes widened. "Are the survivors burned?"

He shook his head. "No, but their bodies are still like open wounds, just like a burn. The protocol is similar."

"What do you mean their bodies are an open wound?"

Someone tapped on the glass behind me, and I jumped, turning to see another man in an outfit just like mine glaring at me with pale eyes. He hit an intercom button, and his voice came clear enough to hear the irritation in it. "If you're coming inside, then do it. I want to sedate them again, and I can't do that until you've had a chance to question them, or so I'm told." He let go of the button and walked further away behind a white curtain that hid the rest of the room from view.

"Gee, I'm just on everybody's happy list today."

Ben put on his mask and said, "Don't take it personally. Doctor Evans is good at what he does, one of the best."

If you want to find a good doctor in a hospital, don't ask other doctors or referral services. Ask a nurse. Nurses always know who's good and who's not. They may not say the bad stuff aloud, but if they say something good about a doctor, you can take it to the bank.

Ben touched something on the wall that was a little too big to be called a button, and the doors whooshed open with a sound like an air lock opening. I stepped inside, and the doors hushed closed behind me. Nothing but the white curtain now.

I didn't want to pull that curtain aside. Everyone was too damned upset. It was going to be bad. Their bodies were like open wounds, Ben had said, but not a burn. What had happened to them? As the old saying goes, only one way to find out. I took a deep breath and pushed the curtain aside.

The room beyond was white and antiseptic looking, a very hospital of a hospital room. Outside this room there had been some attempt at pastels and a pretense that it was just a building, just hallways, just ordinary rooms. All pretense ended at the curtain, and reality was harsh.

There were six beds, each with a whitish plastic hood/tent over the head of the beds and the upper bodies of the patients. Doctor Evans was standing beside the nearest bed. A woman in matching scrubs was further into the room, checking one of the many blinking, beeping pieces of equipment that huddled around each bed. She glanced up, and the small area of her face that showed was a startling darkness. African American, female, and not fat, but beyond that and height I couldn't tell anything underneath the protective clothing. I wouldn't recognize her again without the scrubs. It was strangely anonymous and disturbing. Or maybe that was just me. She dropped her gaze and moved to another bed, doing the same checks, writing something down on a clipboard.

I walked towards the closest bed. Doctor Evans never turned around or acknowledged me in any way. White sheets formed tents over each patient, held up by some sort of frame work to keep the sheet from touching them.

Doctor Evans finally turned to one side so I could see the face of the patient. I blinked and my eyes refused to see it, or maybe my brain just rejected what I was seeing. The face was red and raw as if it should be bleeding, but it didn't bleed. It was like looking at raw meat in the shape of a human face, no meaty skull. The nose had been cut off, leaving bloody holes for the plastic tubes to be shoved inside. The man rolled brown eyes in his sockets, staring up at me. There was something wrong with his eyes beyond the lack of skin around them. It took me a few seconds to realize his eyelids had been cut off.

The room was suddenly warm, so warm, and the mask was suffocating me. I wanted to pull it off so I could breathe. I must have made some movement because the doctor grabbed my wrist.

"Don't take anything off. I'm risking their lives with every new person that comes in here." He let go of my wrist. "Make the risk worth it. Tell me what did this."

I shook my head, concentrating on breathing slowly in and out. When I could talk, I asked, "What's the rest of the body look like?"

He stared at me, his eyes demanding. I met his gaze. Anything was better than looking at what lay in the bed. "You're pale already. Are you sure you want to see the rest?"

"No," I said, truthfully.

Even with just his eyes visible I could see the surprise on his face.

"I would like nothing better than to turn and walk out of this room and keep walking," I said. "I don't need any new nightmares, Doctor Evans, but I was called in here to give my expert opinion. I can't form an opinion without seeing the whole show. If I thought I didn't need to see it all, trust me, I wouldn't ask."

"What do you hope to gain by it?" he asked.

"I'm not here to gape at them, Doctor. But I'm looking for clues to what did this. Most of the time the clues are on the bodies of the victims."

The man in the bed made small jerks, head tossing from side to side as if he were in a great deal of pain. Small helpless noises came from his lipless mouth. I closed my eyes and tried to breathe normally. "Please, Doctor, I need to see." I opened my eyes in time to see him rolling back the sheet. I watched him roll it back, folding it carefully, revealing the man's body an inch at a time. By the time I saw him to the waist, I knew that he'd been skinned alive. I'd hoped it was just the face. That was awful enough on its own, but it takes a hell of a long time to skin a grown man's entire body, a long screaming eternity to do it this well and this thoroughly.

When the sheet rolled back over the groin, I swayed, just a little. It wasn't a man. The groin area was smooth and raw. I glanced back up at the chest. The bone structure looked male. I shook my head. "Is this a man or a woman?"

"Man," he said.

I stared down and couldn't keep from staring at the groin and what was missing. "Shit," I said softly. I closed my eyes again. It was so hot, so very hot. With my eyes closed, I could hear the hiss of the oxygen, the whisper of the nurse's booties as she came towards us, and small sounds from the bed as he twitched and strained against padded restraints at his wrist and ankles.

Restraints? I'd seen them but hadn't really registered them. All I could see was the body. Yes, body. I couldn't keep thinking of the man as a "he." I had to distance myself or I was going to lose it.

Concentrate on business. I opened my eyes. "Why the restraints?" My voice was breathy but clear. I glanced down at the body, then back up, giving Doctor Evans the most complete eye contact I'd ever given. I'd stare at him until I memorized the light crows-feet around his eyes, if I just didn't have to keep looking at what lay on the bed.

"They keep trying to get up and leave," he said.

I frowned, not that he could see it under the mask. "Surely, they're too hurt to get far."

"We've got them on some very strong painkillers. When the pain dies down, they try to leave."

"All of them?" I asked.

He nodded.

I made myself look back to the bed. "Why isn't this just a case of a serial ... not killer. What would you call it? A serial ... " I shook my head. I couldn't think of a word for it. "Why was I called in? I'm a preternatural expert, and this could have been done by a person."

"There are no blade marks on the tissue," Doctor Evans said.

I stared up at him. "What do you mean?"

"I mean that no blade did this because no matter how good they are at torture, there are always telltale signs of the instrument used. You're right when you say the bodies of the victims have the best clues, but not these bodies. It's almost as if their skin just dissolved away."

"Any corrosive agent that could take someone's skin and soft tissue like nose and groin wouldn't just stop at the skin. It would keep eating through the body."

He nodded. "Unless it was washed off immediately, but there's no residue of any known corrosive agent. More than that, the body isn't patterned on an acid burn. The nose and groin were torn away. There are signs of tearing and damage that aren't present elsewhere. It's almost as if whoever did the skinning, skinned them then tore off the extra pieces." He shook his head. "I've traveled all over the world to help catch torturers. I thought I'd seen it all, but I was wrong."

"Are you a forensic pathologist?" I asked.

"Yes."

"But they're not dead," I said.

He looked at me. "No, they're not dead, but the same skills that let me judge a dead body work here, too."

"Ted Forrester said there were deaths. Did they die from the skinning?" Now that I was "working," the room didn't seem so hot. If I concentrated very carefully on the business stuff, maybe I wouldn't throw up on the patients.

"No, they were cut into pieces and left where they fell."

"Blade marks on the cut up bodies, I assume, or you wouldn't have used the word cut."

"There were marks of a cutting tool, but it was like no knife or sword, or hell, bayonet that I'd ever seen. The cuts were deep but not clean, something less refined than a steel blade was used."

"What?" I asked.

He shook his head. "I don't know. The blade didn't cut through the bones, though. Whoever cut the bodies up pulled the bodies apart at the joints. No human would have the strength to do that, not multiple times."

"Probably not," I said.

"You really think a human being could have done this?" he asked, motioning at the bed.

"Are you asking me if a person could do this to another person? If you travel the world testifying in cases of death by torture, then you know exactly what people are capable of doing to each other."

"I'm not saying a person wouldn't do this," he said. "I'm saying I don't think it would be physically possible to do it."

I nodded. "The cutting and tearing, I think might have been human, but I agree with the skinning. If it were done by a human, then there would be tool marks of some kind."

"You say tool marks, not blade marks. Most people assume it takes a blade to skin someone."

"Anything that holds an edge can do it," I said, "though it's slower and usually messier. This is strangely clean."

"Yes," he said, nodding. "Yes, that's a good phrase for it. As horrible as it is, it's still very neatly done, except for the extra tissue that was removed. That was not neatly done, but brutally done."

"Almost like we have two different ... " I kept wanting to say killers, but these people were still alive. "Perpetrators," I said finally.

"What do you mean?"

"Cutting up a body with a dull tool that isn't strong enough to tear through bone, then pulling a person apart with, bare hands is something more in the line of a disorganized serial killer. The careful skinning is something an organized serial killer might do. Why go to the trouble of carefully skinning the face and groin, then pulling off the pieces? It's either two different mutilators, or it's two different personalities."

"A multiple personality?" He made it a question.

"Not exactly, but not all serial killers are so easy to put in one category or another. Some organized criminals have moments of savagery that resemble the disorganized killer, and some organized minds become more disorganized as they escalate their killing. The same isn't true of a disorganized killer. There aren't enough brownies in the pan for them to ape organized methods."