Skin Trade

by Hamilton, Laurell K.

  He actually knelt beside the gurney, peering into the wound. He had plunged his fingers as far in as he could and was fighting to go farther. He’d actually managed to find new blood.

  “What are you looking for?” Memphis asked.

  “This one is deeper, and torn. Did you find the tip of one of the weapons broken off in the wound?”

  “Yes,” and Memphis sounded completely impressed now.

  I was impressed, too, but I also knew where Olaf had gotten his expertise. “You knew the weapon had broken off in that wound, particularly, just by looking at it?” I said.

  He looked up at me, his fingers still deep in the wound, the tearing he’d made bringing out what little blood was left. His face was finally turned away from the doctor, so he let me see what he was thinking. His face softened and filled with heat, anticipation; romantic things. Fuck.

  “Your fingers are smaller than mine; you might be able to reach farther in,” he said, and stood, taking his finger out, letting it make another sound. He closed his eyes and let his face show the shudder he’d been hiding from the doctor because only I could see. It wasn’t a shudder of fear or revulsion.

  I looked away from his face and back at the body. “I’m sure the doctor has gotten everything out of that wound that he can find, right, doc?”

  “Yes, but he’s right. I found the tip of a blade. We’ll analyze it and hopefully learn something.”

  “Are all the bodies like this?” I asked. Olaf was still turned away from the doctor. I’d moved so I couldn’t see his face. I didn’t want to know what he was thinking, and I sure as hell didn’t want to see the thoughts cross his face.

  “Are you done with this body?” he asked.

  “I am; I don’t know about Jeffries here.”

  Olaf spoke without turning around. “Answer Anita’s question before I answer yours.”

  “The bodies that I’ve processed are like this, yes; some worse, one not as bad, but mostly worse.”

  “Then, yes,” Olaf said, “we are done with this body.” His voice was under control, and he turned around, with his face once again its impassive angry normal.

  The doctor covered the body back up. Then we got to see number two. Olaf got to take off his gloves and get fresh ones. I hadn’t touched the body, so I got to keep mine.

  The next body was almost identical, except the man was a little shorter, more muscled, with paler hair and skin. His body had been nearly shredded. It wasn’t just cuts; it was as if some machine had tried to eat him, or . . . With the body cleaned and laid out, you could see the damage, and it was still hard for my mind to take it all in.

  “What the hell happened to him?” I asked it out loud before I was sure I wanted to.

  “The few wounds I’ve been able to isolate so far seem to have some of the same edges as the earlier wounds. It’s the same kind of weapon, maybe the same weapons; I’ll need more tests to be sure.”

  “But this is different”—I gestured at the body—“this is . . . He’s been butchered.”

  “No, not butchered; there was no intent to take meat for eating,” Olaf said.

  I looked up at him. “Meat?” I said.

  “You said he was butchered, but that was not accurate; the meat is ruined this way.”

  “It’s a figure of speech, Otto,” I said, and again didn’t know how to interact with him.

  He was looking at the body, and this time he couldn’t hide everything from the doctor. He was enjoying seeing this corpse.

  I looked at Memphis and tried to think about something other than Olaf. “This looks almost mechanical,” I said. “There’s too much for one human being, isn’t there?”

  “No,” Olaf answered. “A human could do all this damage if some of it were postmortem. I’ve seen people cut at corpses, but this is”—he leaned over the body, closer to the wounds—“different from that.”

  “Different how?” I asked; maybe if I just kept asking questions, he’d answer and not be as creepy.

  He traced his finger across some of the wounds on the chest. Anyone else around a body would have motioned above the skin, but he touched the body. Of course he did.

  “The first body, the wounds are deliberate, spaced. This is frenzy. The wounds crisscross each other. The first one looks almost like a knife fight; most of the wounds are not killing wounds, as if the killer was playing with him, making him last. These wounds are deep from the beginning, as if the killer meant to finish it quickly.” He looked at Memphis. “Did anyone interrupt the scene? Any civilians found among the dead?”

  “You think the killer heard something and stopped playing, to just kill?” Memphis asked.

  “A thought,” Olaf said.

  “No, no civilians, just the police and our local vampire hunter.”

  “Is the last body cut up like this one?” Olaf asked.

  I’d have thought of it eventually, but I was having trouble being a good investigator around Olaf. My creep factor was getting in the way of my thinking.

  “One other member of SWAT is cut up like this. Only the body you’ve already seen and the vampire hunter are cut, as you put it, like they were played with, or offered a knife fight.”

  “Do they have wounds on their hands and arms, like they were armed with a knife and fought back?” I asked.

  Olaf asked, “How do you know about wounds like that?”

  “When you fight with knives, you still use your arms like shields; it’s like defensive wounds, but it looks different. It’s hard to explain, but you know it after a while.”

  “Because you’ve had the same kind of wounds?” he asked. His voice had the faintest edge of eagerness to it. I almost hated to answer the question, but . . . “Yes.”

  “Did you see wounds like that on the arms of the other men?” Olaf asked.

  I thought back, pictured them. “No.”

  “Because they were not there.”

  “So no knife fight,” I said.

  “Or whatever they were fighting was so much faster than they were, they were not able to use their skills to help themselves.”

  I looked up at Olaf. “It was daylight, and there were uncovered windows in the warehouse. It couldn’t have been vampires.”

  He gave me a look. “You of all people know that there are more than just vampires that are faster than humans.”

  “Oh, okay, you mean wereanimals.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  I looked at Memphis. “Were any of the more frenzied attacks made with things other than blades? I mean, did you find evidence of claws or teeth?”

  “Yes,” he said, “and the fact that you figured that out makes me glad you got invited here. These are our men, do you understand?”

  “You wanted to solve it without help from a bunch of strangers,” I said.

  “Yes, we owed them.”

  “I understand,” Olaf said. He was ex-military, so he probably did.

  “But you know the monsters better than regular police. I thought that the Marshal Service having a preternatural branch was just some politically expedient way to give a bunch of killers a badge. But you guys really do know the monsters.”

  I glanced at Olaf, but he was still looking at the body. I answered the doc, “We know monsters, doc, it’s what we do.”

  “I stopped processing the last body when I found what I thought was lycanthrope damage. I wanted to wait for the preternatural experts, which I guess is you.”

  “So they tell us,” I said.

  The door to the autopsy suite swung open, and three new gowned and gloved people entered the room, wheeling another gurney and a new plastic-wrapped figure. This plastic was looser, as if it had been hastily thrown back over the body. Memphis stripped off his gloves and started to put on new ones. New body, new gloves; clean up, move down. I threw my gloves after the doctor’s. Olaf followed at my heels, like a game of follow the leader. Olaf loomed behind me, a little too close. I hurried to catch up with Memphis and the new arrivals. Three s
trangers and a corpse, and I was eager to meet them. Anyone was a step up from Olaf at this point.

  16

  I EXPECTED EDWARD and Bernardo to trail after the body, but they didn’t. I wondered if Edward had gotten the call about the warrants. The three strangers were already suited up and ready to go. Memphis introduced one as Dale and the other as Patricia. Dale had glasses behind his faceplate and short, brown hair. Apparently, he wanted to be extra careful. Patricia wore just the protective glasses. She was taller than me and had her hair in tight, dark pigtails. You didn’t see many grown women who wore pigtails. She was a little tall for Olaf’s preference, but the hair was right. I’d have rather had all men, or at least a blonde. But I couldn’t figure out how to ask without giving away the fact that we had a serial killer in our midst and it wasn’t the bad guy we were chasing. Of course, maybe I should stop worrying about other women and just watch my own ass for a change. No, because I knew what Olaf was, and if he hurt someone, I would feel responsible. Stupid, or just true?

  The last man in the room had a camera in his gloved hands.

  Memphis said, “This is Rose.”

  “Rose?” Olaf made it a question.

  “It’s short for something worse,” Rose said, and that was all he said. I wondered what could be worse, for a guy, than Rose? But I didn’t ask; something about the way he’d said the last comment left no room for questions. He just got ready to photograph Dale and Patricia once they started undressing the corpse. The doctor had explained to us that we were not to touch the body until he said so, because we could screw up his evidence. Fine with me; I was never in a hurry to touch the messily dead. And the body on the gurney was messy.

  The first thing my eyes saw was darkness. The body was dressed in the same dark green SWAT gear that Grimes and his men had been wearing. The blood had soaked into the cloth and turned most of it black, so the body was a dark shape on the tan plastic gurney. His face was a pale blur where they’d removed his helmet, but his hair was as dark as the uniform. His eyebrows were thick and dark, too. But below the eyebrows, the face was destroyed, gone, in a red ruin that my eyes didn’t want to make sense of.

  I knew why Memphis had thought shapeshifter. I couldn’t tell from across the room for sure, but it looked like something had bitten off most of the man’s lower face.

  Memphis spoke into a small digital recorder. “The examination recommenced at two thirty p.m. Marshals Anita Blake and Otto Jeffries observing.” He looked at me from where he stood near the body. “Are you going to do your observation from across the room, Marshals?”

  “No,” I said, and walked forward. I took a deep breath behind my thin mask and went to stand by the doc and the others.

  Olaf came behind me like a scary, plastic-wrapped shadow. I knew he wasn’t spooked by the body, so apparently he was going to use the entire thing as an excuse to stay as close to me as possible. Great.

  Up close, the ruin of the face was more obvious. I’d seen worse, but sometimes it’s not about worse. Sometimes it’s about enough. Lately, I’d begun to feel like I’d had enough. If I’d been on any normal police force, they’d have transferred me off violent crimes after two to four years. I was at six years and counting, and no one was going to offer. There weren’t enough marshals in the preternatural branch to trade us around, and I wasn’t trained to be a normal marshal.

  I stared down at the body, careful to think body and not man. Everyone copes differently; for me it’s very important to think body, thing. The thing on the gurney was not a person anymore, and for me to do my job, I had to keep believing that. One of the reasons I didn’t do the morgue stakings anymore is that I stopped being able to think of vampires as things. Once a thing becomes a person, it’s harder to kill.

  “Once you got the plastic off, you stopped because it looked like some really big jaws crunched down on his lower face,” I said.

  “Exactly what I thought,” Memphis said.

  There were pale bits of bone showing, but the lower jaw was just ripped away, gone. “Did you find the lower jaw?”

  “We did not.”

  Olaf leaned over me, spooning his much taller body over mine, so that he leaned along me. He was leaning over to look at the wound, but his body was as close to mine as he could get through his protective gown and my clothes. When I put the gown on, I didn’t think I’d have to worry about protecting my back. Of course, a second gown wasn’t really the kind of protection I wanted from Olaf; guns came to mind.

  My pulse was in my throat, and it wasn’t the corpse that was bothering me. “Back up, Otto,” I said, through gritted teeth.

  “I think it could be a tool and not jaws,” he said, leaning even closer, pressing himself against me. I was suddenly aware that he was happy to be pressed up against me.

  My skin ran hot, and I wasn’t sure if I was going to be sick or pass out. I shoved him backward hard and stepped away from him and the body. I must have moved faster than I thought, because Dale and Patricia moved out of my way, and I had the end of the table to myself.

  Olaf stared at me, and his eyes were not neutral. Was he thinking of the last time when he’d forced me to help him cut up vampires, and he’d ended the night by masturbating with blood on his hands in front of me? I’d thrown up then, too.

  “You fucking bastard,” but my voice didn’t sound tough. It sounded weak and panicked. Shit!

  “There are tools that could crush a man’s face like this, Anita.” He talked business, but his face wasn’t businesslike. A slight smile curled his lips, and his eyes held the kind of heat that didn’t match being in an autopsy room.

  I wanted to run out of that room and away from him, but I couldn’t let him win. I couldn’t fail like that in front of strangers. I couldn’t give the big bastard the satisfaction. Could I?

  I took a few deep breaths through the little mask and got my body under control. Concentrate, ease the breathing, ease the pulse, control. It was the same way I had learned to keep the beasts from rising. You had to have that spurt of adrenaline; if you could calm it or keep it from happening, then the rest could not follow.

  I finally gave him calm eyes. “You stay on your side of the table, Otto. Do not invade my personal space again, or I will have you up on sexual harassment charges.”

  “I did nothing wrong,” he said.

  Memphis cleared his throat, “Marshal Jeffries, if you aren’t dating this young lady, then I suggest you do what she says. I’ve seen men do similar things ‘teaching,’ ”—he made little quotation marks with his fingers— “women baseball, golf, shooting even, but I’ve never seen anyone try it in autopsy.”

  “You are a sick motherfucker,” Rose said cheerfully.

  Olaf turned a look on him that wiped the smile off his face. In fact, Rose went a little pale behind his faceplate. “You do not know me well enough to say such things.”

  “Hey, man, just agreeing with the doc and Marshal Blake.”

  “What tool could do this kind of damage?” Memphis asked, trying to get us all back to work.

  “There are crushing tools, used in the meat industry. Some to dehorn cattle, others for castration, and some to cut through the neck in a single movement.”

  “Why would someone carry that kind of stuff with them?” I asked.

  Olaf shrugged. “I do not know, but I am saying that there are alternatives to lycanthropes for the injuries.”

  “Point taken,” Memphis said. He looked at me, and his eyes were kinder. “Marshal Blake, are you ready to see the rest of the body, or do you need a minute?”

  “If he stays on his side of the table, I’ll be fine.”

  “Duly noted,” Memphis said, and he gave a less friendly look to Olaf.

  I moved around the gurney, putting it between Olaf and myself. It was the best I could do and stay in the room. But after we finished with this body, I was finding Edward and we were trading dance partners. I could not work with Olaf in the morgue. He saw the whole thing as foreplay, and I
just couldn’t deal. No, not couldn’t, wouldn’t.

  Bernardo would flirt, but he wouldn’t flirt around the bodies. He didn’t think freshly slaughtered bodies were sexy; it would be downright refreshing after working with serial killer boy, no matter how outrageous the flirting got.

  The doctor started to unfasten the bulletproof vest, then stopped. “Take a few close-ups, Rose.” The doc pointed with gloved fingers at places on the vest. Olaf had already leaned in, so if I was to see what had excited the doctor, I had to lean in, too. Shit. Was I so bothered by Olaf that I could not do my job?

  I finally leaned closer and saw slash marks in the vest. They could have been from blades or really big claws. It was hard to tell through the cloth. Bare skin would tell me more.

  An autopsy for a murder victim is very intimate. It’s not just the cutting of the body but the undressing. You don’t want to cut or further damage the clothes, in case you mess up clues, so you have to pick the body up, hold it, undress it like some huge doll or sleeping child. At least rigor had come and gone. A body in full rigor is like trying to undress a statue, except it feels unlike any statue you could ever touch.

  I’ve never envied the morgue technicians their job.

  Dale and Patricia moved in to raise the body and ease the vest off. I never liked being in the room for this part. I’m not sure why it bothered me to see the corpse undressed, but it did. Maybe it’s because it’s a part of the process I don’t usually get to see. For me, the dead are either fully dressed or naked. Watching them go from one state to the other just seemed like an invasion of their privacy. Did that sound silly? The dead shell on that table didn’t give a shit. He was way past embarrassment, but I wasn’t. It’s always the living that fuck up death; the dead are fine with it.

  Olaf was beside me again, but not close enough for me to bitch—yet. “Why does it bother you to see them undress it?”

  My shoulders hunched, and I crossed my arms over the green gown, flexing my hands in the gloves. “How do you know I’m bothered?”