[Anita Blake 17] - Skin Trade

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  “You can seek power after the marshals have killed the traitor and his master.”

  “What traitor?” I asked.

  Victor turned, giving his mother his back. I’m not sure I would have done that, but then she wasn’t my mom. “The first murders were strippers, just like the ones in your city. But the last one had claw marks and vampire bites.”

  I cursed the Vegas PD for not mentioning this little fact to me. It would have been nice to know that the last victim had shown claw marks. That was a change from all the other cities that Vittorio had hunted in. It proved that some part of the Vegas force didn’t trust me. That was going to make solving crime, any crime, harder here. Crispin picked up my anxiety again. His hand on my back began to make those soothing circles.

  “What makes you think it’s a weretiger?” I asked.

  “Mother,” Victor said, and stepped aside to let us see each other again.

  She gave him a not entirely happy look, but spoke. “I have felt another vampire’s pull on my tigers. As you tried today to call me to you, and ended by calling some of my children, so this other vampire was seeking. I thought I had prevented it, but now I believe that he managed to steal away one of mine. Or perhaps a different clan, but tiger, he was calling tiger.”

  “Do you know for certain that the vampire was a he?” I asked.

  She nodded. “The energy was male.”

  “Ask her how she knows that for certain,” Edward asked in my ear.

  I held my hand out to the weretigers. I moved a little away from Crispin’s hand, too. He took the hint and let his hand drop away from me. “Excuse me, she knows it was male, Marshal Forrester, because the energy tasted or smelled male to her.”

  “You can tell from energy if a vampire is male or female?” Bernardo asked.

  I nodded. “Sometimes.”

  Bibiana smiled at me, as if I’d said a smart thing. “Yes, he tasted of men, but . . .” She frowned.

  “But what?” I asked.

  “You are of the line of Belle Morte?”

  “Jean-Claude is,” I said.

  She waved it away as if I were quibbling. “Most vampire lines are cold things, but not hers. You are closer to the warmth of the wereanimal, I think. Can you taste someone’s sexual energy from a distance?”

  I thought about that. “Sometimes.”

  Again, she smiled like I’d said the right thing. “There was something wrong with this vampire’s energy. Something stunted, or thwarted in some way. It was as if his sex had become rage.”

  “Have you ever felt something similar from anyone else?” I asked.

  “We had a weretiger that came to us. We tried to discipline him, save him, but in the end he had to be destroyed for everyone’s sake.”

  To his mother’s explanation, Victor added, “He was a serial rapist. The attacks became more violent.” He sighed.

  “Ava’s attacker?” I asked.

  He gave me a startled look. “Did you look at her case file?”

  I shook my head. “Just a guess.”

  “It was not a guess,” Bibiana said. “You read his body posture. You smelled his scent.”

  I shrugged because I didn’t want to argue, and wasn’t entirely sure I could. “But you’re saying that this vampire’s energy felt similar to the serial rapist that you’d sensed before?”

  “Yes, but . . .” She shivered, and this time I could taste her fear.

  “He scared you,” I said.

  She nodded.

  “My mother does not frighten easily,” Victor said.

  “I got that impression,” I said.

  He smiled at me. “We have answered your questions. Now, would you answer one of ours?”

  “Sorry, but one more. Do you know who the traitor is?”

  They exchanged a look.

  “I swear that I do not. If this vampire has stolen one of our people, he has done it so completely that I did not suspect until the first claw marks showed on the bodies.”

  “If I could help you narrow down the field, would you gather them for me, and let us question them at the police station?”

  They exchanged another look that included Rick. Finally, Victor nodded, and Bibiana said, “We would.”

  “How can you help us narrow it down?” Victor asked. “Are you hinting that you’re a more powerful weretiger than we are?”

  “No, absolutely not, but I’ve seen the bodies.”

  Olaf came on the earpiece. “Do not share this information with them.”

  I ignored him. “I know we’re looking for someone under six feet in human form, or with abnormally small hands for his or her size.”

  “Anita,” Olaf said.

  Edward said, “She knows what’s she doing, Otto.”

  “You measured the claw marks,” Victor said.

  I nodded.

  “I do not trust the tigers,” Olaf said.

  “Let her work,” Edward said.

  I did my best to ignore it all, as Victor said, “That narrows it a little.”

  “Here’s the real narrowing,” I said. “This tiger is able to shift just his or her hands into claws, and teeth into fangs, without changing into half-human completely.”

  I’d shocked them, all of them. They weren’t vampires, so they didn’t try to hide it. “That would explain it,” Victor said.

  “Explain what?” I asked.

  “Why my mother and I couldn’t find the truth from our traitor. If he’s powerful enough to do that, then he may be powerful enough to lie to us.”

  “That would have to be pretty damn powerful,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said.

  I stared at him, and then at Bibiana’s stricken face. “You think you know who it is.”

  “No, but it is a very short list of possibilities. Some of our most trusted people are on that list,” Victor said.

  Bibiana gave me a look of such pain. “Whoever it is, it will hurt us as a clan. It will undermine our authority, and make us have to discipline our people.”

  “You mean, if they find out you missed this guy hiding in plain sight, some of them will challenge you for leadership.”

  “They will try,” she said, and there was something so calm, so sure, so confident. I wouldn’t have wanted to go up against her, and with Victor at her side, you’d have to be pretty confident—or nuts.

  Then I had a thought, a bad one. “If Vittorio’s animal to call is tiger, and he’s master enough to do all this, then he’s master enough to challenge Max for the city.”

  “The vampire council has forbidden Masters of the City to war against one another in America,” Bibiana said.

  “Yeah, and they frown on that whole serial-killer-slaughtering-cops thing, too. I don’t think Vittorio sweats the rules much.”

  “You think he’ll try for my father?” Victor asked.

  “I think it’s a possibility. I’d take extra security measures until we get him.”

  “I’ll see that it’s done,” he said.

  “He has more than just one weretiger at his daytime beck and call,” I said.

  “What else?”

  “I’m not sure, but if I were you, I’d call that extra security in now. Because it would be a bitch to miss saving Max by a few minutes.”

  Victor and I had one of those looks, and then he simply reached into his pocket for a cell phone and started calling in more help. He walked to the far side of the room so I couldn’t hear exactly what he was saying. I was okay with that.

  Bibiana looked at me. “You are the first true queen with no clan that we have found since Victor showed himself worthy.”

  “Worthy of what?” I asked.

  “Starting his own clan. We have not had a male king among the tigers in centuries. The little queens will hive off, but it is only because we do not wish to kill our daughters. It is not because there is enough power to make another clan. Victor has that power, but he needs a queen.”

  I stared at her. “Are you hinting that you wan
t me to, what, be your son’s queen?”

  “I’m saying that if you were not already wedded so tightly to Jean-Claude, I would ask you to marry my son.”

  I stared at her. “Gosh, I don’t know what to say, Bibiana.”

  Victor came back from his side of the room, clipping the phone back into his pocket. “I’ve got extra men around Father, and I’ll up the security on our clubs, just in case.” He looked from one of us to the other, frowning. “Did I miss something?”

  Bernardo laughed.

  Crispin said, “Chang-Bibi offered you to Anita in marriage.”

  “Mother!”

  “You may never meet another queen of her power, Victor.”

  “She belongs to another master vampire. It is against every rule to interfere in that.”

  “I am your mother and your queen. It’s my job to interfere.”

  “Leave Marshal Blake alone, Mother.”

  Bibiana smiled at us both, and it was that smile you never want to see on anyone’s mother’s face. That look that says they’d welcome you to the family in a hot second, if only their son would cooperate.

  Bernardo saved me. “When can you bring the weretigers to the station for questioning?”

  “We need to do it carefully.” He looked at us. “I will admit this here, but never publicly. It would go better if the police in full gear went with us from weretiger to weretiger. If they are good enough to lie to us like this, then I won’t be able to lie to them about why we want them to go to the police.”

  “I’ll talk to the Vegas police.” But I wondered how hard it was going to be to keep them from being a little trigger-happy as we hunted the weretiger that had killed one of their own? Everyone had been calm, almost unusually calm, about it all. It was almost like the pause between storms.

  “You look worried,” Victor said.

  “How many weretigers on this list?”

  “Five,” he said.

  “Six,” she said.

  “Mother . . .”

  “You would leave the woman out, but she is powerful, and she is under six feet.”

  He nodded. “You’re right, I would have left her off. I’m sorry. You get a team of your people ready, and I’ll try to have them gathered in one place. I can’t lie well enough to take them to the station for you, but I think I can arrange something.”

  “It might be better to take them in their homes,” I said.

  “Take them, you mean kill them.”

  “No, I really need this guy, or girl, alive. We need to question them about Vittorio, to find out his daytime resting place. If we get this weretiger and make him or her talk, then we could execute Vittorio before nightfall.”

  “We will give you the addresses, but if you want to question them, you will need Victor or me present.”

  “Why?” Bernardo asked.

  “Because we can do things to make them talk that you cannot,” she said.

  “If it’s illegal, I don’t think . . .”

  “He killed, or helped kill, police officers. Tell me that you can’t get everyone to look the other way for just a few minutes?”

  I looked at Victor and met his eyes in their gold glasses. I would have liked to defend my fellow officers, but frankly, if roughing up this guy would find us Vittorio before dark, I’d disable the cameras in the interrogation room personally. Was it wrong to admit that? Only on record. Which was another reason I was still more assassin than cop.

  37

  WE WERE IN the parking lot of an elementary school. It was long enough after hours that the school was empty, no children to peer out of the windows at the show outside. Because when I say we, I mean Las Vegas Metro SWAT, Edward, Olaf, Bernardo, Undersheriff Shaw, a bevy of homicide detectives, and some uniforms and cars that would eventually close off the streets so no one drove by at the wrong moment. Victor was in one of the cars because Shaw had kicked a fit about him being in on the planning. The powers that be had insisted he be nearby to maybe talk the weretiger down, like getting the wife on the phone to talk to someone who’s taken hostages. At least Victor was sitting in air-conditioning unlike the rest of us. But it wasn’t just people that made for the show. It was every SWAT operator’s SUV or truck. It was the huge white RV that would be the command center. The big, black shape of the B.E.A.R., which I would have called huge if the RV hadn’t been sitting near it. There was a BearCat, like a smaller brother of the B.E.A.R. It was Sergeant Hooper, who had the biggest sticky notes I’d ever seen laid out on the hood of his truck. The huge sticky notes held notes incorporating everyone’s information. Notes from the small laptop that was hooked directly to the huge white RV, where Lieutenant Grimes and his tech team were shooting them all the information they could find on Gregory Minns, the first weretiger on our list.

  Part of that info was the layout of his house. In St. Louis they have to scout the actual house, but in Vegas, because of the huge number of cookie-cutter housing developments, the two operators had found out which model Minns’s house was, and scouted an identical one blocks away. They’d gotten the information without any chance of alerting the weretiger, which was a lot harder to do than it sounded.

  “We know that wereanimals can smell our scent, which is why we’re paying attention to the prevailing winds,” Hooper said.

  “You mean you’re sneaking up on the house as if Gregory Minns were big game, and you were in the jungle,” I said.

  Hooper seemed to think about it, then nodded. “Not a hunt in the traditional sense, because we’re hoping to take the suspect alive, but yes.”

  I looked at Edward. He said, “They’ve done this before, Anita.”

  “Sorry, Sergeant, just not used to working with this many people who actually seem to understand that lycanthropes aren’t human, but still have the same rights as regular humans.”

  “We know our job,” Hooper said.

  “I know that, Sergeant. I’ll just shut up now.”

  He almost smiled, then went back to his notes.

  “How do you get around the fact that they can hear your heartbeat from yards away?” Edward asked, and I knew by his tone that he was actually wondering if they’d figured out a solution. When Edward asks someone else a question like that, there is no higher praise.

  “No one can be quiet enough to stop their heartbeat,” Hooper said.

  I thought, Vampires can, but I didn’t say it out loud. It wouldn’t have helped anything. No police force in the United States allowed vampires to join up. If you were a cop and “survived” an attack and became a vampire, you were fired. I had a friend back in St. Louis, Dave, who’d been a cop until he became a vampire in the line of duty, but instead of a fancy cop funeral, he got kicked out. The police honor their dead, as long as they aren’t still able to walk around.

  Bernardo said, “They can’t all hear a heartbeat from yards away, and they hear better in animal form than human.”

  I looked at him and couldn’t keep the surprise off my face. He grinned at me. “You look surprised, so I must be right.”

  I nodded. “Sorry, but sometimes the flirt act makes me forget that there’s actually a pretty good mind in there.”

  He shrugged those broad shoulders but looked pleased.

  Harry, who was the assistant team leader (ATL), was younger than Hooper, but older than most of the others. SWAT was a young man’s game, and the fact that the team had this many people over forty was impressive, because I knew they kept up or they got out. He said, “The last visual we had of the subject was human form, so the hearing, sense of smell, all of it isn’t that much above human-normal from a distance, and once we’re in the room with him, he can smell us all he wants, we’ll be on top of him.”

  “What’s your policy if he’s shifted?” I asked.

  Hooper answered, with no glance at anyone, “With an active warrant of execution, if they shift, it’s a kill.”

  We all nodded.

  “It is easier to kill them in human form,” Olaf said.


  The operators looked up at him, and he was the only one of us that they had to look up to, by even an inch. “We’re hoping to get the location of the serial killer’s daytime lair, Jeffries, which means we need Minns alive.”

  It was nice to have someone else in charge who could lecture Olaf. I had to turn away both to hide my pleased expression and not to make eye contact with Edward or Bernardo; I was afraid it would have turned from a smile to giggles. The tension was growing thicker around all of us, anticipation and adrenaline in the very air. I realized that was something that lycanthropes could sense, too. But again, what could we do about it? If they’d truly been animals, we could have used things to disguise our scent, but if we smelled strongly of something weird, they’d know it was all wrong. They were people with the senses of animals; it made them hard to kill, dangerous to hunt. I looked up at the sky and the sun that was moving, inexorably, toward the horizon.

  “We want to do this before dark, too, Blake,” Harry said.

  “Sorry, but when you spend most of your life hunting vampires, you get very aware of where the sun is in the sky.”

  He looked very serious. “I wouldn’t want to do your job every day.”

  I smiled, not sure it was amused. “Some days neither do I.”

  Undersheriff Shaw moved closer. I’d hoped he was just going to observe. “You know more than you’re telling about the local tigers, Blake.”

  “You questioned all of us for hours apiece, Shaw. We could have been ahead of this, and maybe, just maybe, done before dark. Now there’s no way. We’ll do our best, but dark will catch us, and this situation will go from bad to worse.”

  “I heard you came out of Max’s place with a new friend. Hand in hand with one of his weretigers. You really have a thing for strippers, don’t you, Blake?”

  That let me know that we’d been watched, or Max was being watched. More than that, Edward hadn’t picked up on it, either, so they were good, whoever it had been.

  I lowered my sunglasses enough to give him my eyes. “I find your overly intense interest in my personal life disturbing, Shaw.”