Shadow Hunt

by Melissa F. Olson

  Oh, gross. “Who does that?”

  He glanced at me, a little amused. “I was going to ask you the same question,” he said. “Even in a city with as much crime as LA, you don’t get a lot of people who die by beheading. Sometimes a body will be decapitated in a traffic accident, or someone will cut a head off after death, but it’s really hard to kill someone by chopping off their head. Even if you’ve got them unconscious, there are easier ways to do it.”

  “What’s the victim’s name?”

  Jesse checked his hand, where he’d written the name. “Karl Schmidt.”

  I turned the name over in my mind for a few minutes, but came up with nothing. “Never heard of him. But I’ll check with the others.”

  I texted Dashiell, Kirsten, and Will. Neither Kirsten nor Will had heard of Karl Schmidt. Dashiell called me back about ten minutes later. I put him on speakerphone at his request.

  “I don’t know this Karl Schmidt,” he said crisply. “But I have arranged for the two of you to go look at his residence.”

  I was surprised that he was taking the whole beheading thing so seriously. “Do you mean you want us to go see the body?” I asked. “My understanding is that it’s at the coroner’s building now.”

  “I spoke to the coroner,” he said curtly. “The body has gone through a preliminary examination, but they are unable to do the autopsy until the morning. There is nothing to see except a naked body and a detached head.”

  “What about defensive wounds?” Jesse asked.

  “There were none.”

  Jesse’s eyes widened. “That’s . . . unusual.”

  “Which is one of the reasons why I’m sending you two down there.” Dashiell was starting to sound impatient with us. “The house is your best source of information. I have arranged for one of the forensics people to meet you there and walk you through the scene. I will also send a vampire so you can erase his memory, and the memory of anyone else you need to speak to.”

  Ugh. This was annoying, though not really unexpected. Most of the time, my job didn’t involve human witnesses—or rather, they’d already been pressed and sent home by the time I was called in. But from time to time I dealt with a situation that was still ongoing, and required the aid of vampires. “Can it just be Molly?” I tried not to sound whiny, considering the thinness of the ice I was standing on. “I hate working with people I don’t know.”

  There was a long pause. “No,” Dashiell said finally. “I think you and Molly have had enough adventures for one weekend, don’t you?” His voice hardened with every word.

  I winced. He didn’t want Molly and me colluding, or conspiring, or whatever c-word meant we weren’t team players. I was irritated by the lack of trust . . . but I also kind of deserved it. Either way, I wasn’t stupid enough to answer him. Go me.

  “However,” Dashiell went on, “considering the current circumstances, I concede that you’d do well with an ally at your side. I’ll call Wyatt.”

  I brightened. Wyatt was the cowboy vampire I’d brought back with me from Vegas. Only six weeks ago, he’d been suicidal after the death of his wife, but since coming to Los Angeles, he’d found a job and a place in Dashiell’s service. I went and checked on him a couple of times a week at the bar where he worked, and he seemed to have found a degree of peace. He’d even stopped announcing his running countdown of the days left before my agreement to kill him kicked in.

  Long story.

  “What about Shadow?” I said.

  “Everyone will continue their current efforts, Scarlett, but until we get more information, there’s not much else we can do,” he said, not unkindly. “Get back to me when you know whether or not this murder is Old World.”

  I wondered if he was sending us to a crime scene just to keep me busy, so I’d stop pestering him about the search. But he was right—I couldn’t think of anything else to do.

  After we hung up, Jesse looked at me. “So he can just arrange a tour of an active LAPD crime scene?”

  I shrugged. “The man has juice.”

  We got ready to leave, which felt strange without Shadow hanging out by my leg, nudging my thigh to remind me that she wanted to come too. After I grabbed my keys and jacket and made sure I had a knife in each boot, we headed out to my van, the White Whale. I started toward the driver’s seat, then stopped in my tracks, putting a hand on the hood. The morning sickness was making itself known again. “Change of plans,” I mumbled, holding out the keys. “You drive.”

  He didn’t comment, but when we got on the road, Jesse pulled into a gas station instead of heading for the freeway. The tank was already pretty full, but before I could ask what he was doing, he was out of the van and jogging into the store. He returned a few minutes later with a small box of saltines. “You need to eat,” he ordered, thrusting the crackers at me.

  “Dammit, you too?”

  The whole idea of eating was repulsive at the moment, but I reluctantly tore open the package and bit off a cracker. It tasted like crunchy dust, but I kept mechanically chewing anyway. “So what’s the significance of no defensive wounds?” I asked. “Dashiell seemed surprised, and your eyes went all ‘ooooh.’”

  “I’ve never had a beheading case, but we studied one at the academy,” Jesse replied. “Let’s say I’ve got an ax.”

  I blinked, swallowing a chunk of wet sawdust. “Sure. Kind of a left turn there, but fine. Ax.”

  “If I swung it toward your neck, what would you do?” He took his right hand off the wheel to pantomime the swing.

  I thought for a second. “Step into the swing so I’m too close for you to use the ax.”

  “And that’s not a bad choice, but then I could punch you, and you’d stagger back far enough for me to cut off your head.”

  I nodded, understanding. “Which would at least give me a bruise. What if I grabbed for the ax?”

  “You’d probably get in the way of the blade and get cut. If you tried to wrestle it away from me, or hit me, that would show up somewhere: abrasions on your hands, cuts on your knuckles. Something.”

  “What if I never saw you coming?” I suggested. “Ax ninja?”

  “That’s pretty much the only possible way, but it takes a lot of force to remove someone’s head in one clean blow. Unless the killer is a complete badass with brass balls, he probably wouldn’t use enough force on the first pass. He’d have to hack at you, and if you could move at all, you’d get your hands up and your fingers would get cut, or you’d try to crawl away from him, which would likely result in carpet burns or broken fingernails. Defensive wounds.”

  Huh. I thought that over for a few seconds. “Not if I was unconscious. Or pressed,” I reminded him. “It seems possible if there’s a vampire involved.”

  “Maybe one of the Luparii’s vampires?” he suggested.

  I groaned. “God, I hope not.” That would really be the pickle on this shit sandwich of a situation.

  Chapter 19

  Half an hour later, I threw my arms around a tall, lean vampire with a mustache that looked like it had arrived from 1890 in a time machine.

  Jesse and I had parked just down the block from the crime scene house, and Wyatt pulled up behind us a second later, ambling over to greet me in his long duster jacket and cowboy hat, his big handlebar ’stache turned up in a smile. I jumped out of the van and hurried over to him. I’m not generally a hugger, but Wyatt always seemed like he needed it. And he was sort of my responsibility.

  I stepped back and looked at Jesse. “Wyatt, this is my friend Jesse. Jesse, Wyatt.”

  The men gave each other nearly identical wary looks, and then Wyatt looked down at me with concern. “Miss Scarlett, are you all right? You look a little peaked.”

  “I’m fine, Wyatt. Let’s get this over with.” I stepped toward the house, then paused and looked back at him. “There might be a lot of blood in there, and I’ll need to shrink my radius so you can press the human. Did you, um, already eat tonight?”

  Wyatt looked surprise
d, but gave me his slow, lazy grin. “Yes, ma’am. Don’t you worry about that.”

  We trooped toward the house, a yellow stucco bungalow with crime scene tape wrapped on little sticks to block off the whole yard. The yard itself was tiny, maybe ten square feet total, with some of those goddamned bird-of-paradise plants lining the little footpath leading to the front step. I hate those flowers. They always look like they’re about to come to life and peck me to death. At the very least, they’re all definitely planning something.

  There was someone waiting on the front stoop: a black guy in his late thirties, short and lithe-looking. He stood up as we approached, and his eyes narrowed. “Jesse Cruz?” he said in a voice with a soft southern accent.

  I looked at Jesse out of the corner of my eye, and caught the way his shoulders slumped. “Hey, Aaron. I didn’t know you were working this case. How’s it going?”

  The other man ignored the question, looking pointedly at Wyatt and me. “And who are you?”

  “Jay Aaron, this is Scarlett and that’s Wyatt,” Jesse said. “Aaron is a crime scene investigator.”

  Aaron made no effort to shake hands. “I was here from eleven o’clock this morning until half an hour ago, then I get called to come back and show around some consultant team,” he said coldly, his gaze moving back to Jesse. “That your new gig? Consulting?” He managed to imbue that one word with an impressive amount of scorn.

  Jesse started to answer, but Wyatt glanced at me. I nodded and shrank my radius down to a couple of feet. Wyatt stepped forward, making eye contact with Aaron. “You don’t want to ask us any more questions about why we’re here,” he said smoothly. “You want to take us inside now.”

  Aaron blinked a couple of times, then turned to the door. “Right. Let’s head in.”

  Behind his back, Jesse shot both of us a glare, but I shrugged, unrepentant. We were going to erase this guy’s entire memory of us anyway. Might as well move things along.

  Besides, he was kind of being an asshole.

  We put on gloves, hairnets, and booties—Wyatt had to take off his cowboy boots to get his on—and then Aaron led us silently through the tiny foyer into a small, tidy living room that had last been decorated in the late seventies. There were splashes of blood everywhere, but they were especially concentrated around a blue velvet La-Z-Boy. Jesse went straight toward it, then looked quizzically over his shoulder at Aaron. “Was he sitting in the chair when someone cut off his head?”

  “No.” Aaron still looked sullen. “Blood spatter indicates he was kneeling in front of the chair.”

  Not unconscious, then. “Clean slice, or was there hacking?” Jesse asked.

  “One slice,” Aaron said, with the tiniest bit of relish in his voice.

  While Jesse questioned Aaron, Wyatt leaned sideways in the doorway, where he had a clear view of both the living room and the foyer with the front door. His job wasn’t detecting clues so much as watching our backs and pressing Aaron when we were done. He caught me glancing at him and gave me a slow wink, his moustache turning up at the ends as he grinned at me. I smiled back. It was good to be working together again.

  I turned back to the living room. I wasn’t sure how useful I would be on the clue front either, since all my experience with crime scenes involved trying to destroy them, but I wandered around the room, taking it in. I kept an ear on Jesse’s conversation with Aaron, but the forensic details didn’t really interest me. Besides, Jesse would translate the information into whatever I needed to know.

  When you got past the death stench, the whole room had an underlying smell that I naturally associated with old man. Karl Schmidt had been in his eighties, which made his odd death even stranger. If you want to kill a man that old, there are a hundred easier ways to do it, all of which would get less interest from the police.

  I scanned the titles on the bookshelf, which looked like standard old-man picks: Louis L’Amour, Agatha Christie, and a decent amount of nonfiction covering two subjects: baseball and World War II. At the end of the shelf, I picked up a photograph in a simple oak frame: an elderly man sitting at a picnic table, the kind of thing they had at every public park in LA. He was surrounded by children: mugging on the bench next to him, laughing at his feet, even a couple hanging over his shoulder. The youngest, a girl of about three, sat in his lap looking content as hell. Schmidt and his grandchildren, probably. I counted twelve of them, ranging in age from toddlers to maybe twenty or twenty-one.

  I studied Schmidt’s face. While the children had light brown skin, he was alabaster-pale, with faded blue eyes sunk into a deeply wrinkled face. He appeared to be in very good shape for his age—I could see the muscle definition on his forearm, where it was looped carefully around the girl in his lap. The old man was smiling, but it was a worried, protective smile, like he needed to stay on guard lest someone run up and snatch the children away from him.

  I realized that the voices behind me had risen in volume, and turned around. Aaron and Jesse were still standing near the armchair, but their body language was combative. “—which you’d know if you hadn’t decided to cash out of doing your job,” Aaron was snapping.

  Jesse didn’t take the bait, but he looked like he was losing patience. “You know this isn’t about that, Jay.”

  “Isn’t it?” Aaron waved his arms to indicate the room. “How do I know you’re not just here to write a sequel?”

  Wyatt was raising his eyebrows at me from the doorway, asking if it was time to press Aaron. Jesse caught the look and shook his head. “I just want to understand,” he said to Aaron. “Schmidt was sitting in the chair, watching TV, and someone came in and made him kneel down so they could behead him. But what was the weapon?”

  “You tell me, supercop,” Aaron said snidely, crossing his arms over his chest.

  “Okay, that’s enough,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Wyatt, if you would help Mr. Aaron with his cooperation skills?” I pulled in my radius.

  Wyatt, now a vampire again, took a step toward Aaron . . . but he paused, his nostrils flaring briefly. I was about to ask, but he shook his head a little and advanced on the criminologist, who shrank away from him, backing up toward my end of the room. Unfortunately for Aaron, eye contact was all Wyatt needed. “Answer our questions,” he said in a perfectly level voice, his eyes drilling into Aaron’s. “And keep a civil tongue in your head.”

  The smaller man sort of went slack, then nodded. Jesse sighed, not liking any of this. I couldn’t really blame him. “What kind of weapon was used?” he asked. “An ax?”

  “No,” Aaron said in a wooden voice, his eyes locked on Wyatt. “We have to do further testing, but the angle of blood spatter suggests some sort of machete or sword.”

  Jesse and I exchanged a bewildered look. A sword? Like an actual motherfucking sword? I knew lots of vampires who carried knives so they could make a quick little cut to feed from instead of using their teeth. But a sword was impractical and raised too many questions. Everyone in the Old World took pains to blend in, not stand out. This whole thing felt fishy.

  “Was the lock on the front door damaged?” Jesse asked Aaron next.

  “No.”

  “Did you find any physical evidence from the suspect?”

  “There were several sets of fingerprints, but no hair or fibers that didn’t come from the victim,” Aaron replied, still in that unsettling monotone.

  “Who’s in charge of the case?”

  “Abramowitz.”

  Jesse gave a tiny headshake, mostly to himself. He didn’t know the name. “Is he any good?”

  “No, not really.”

  The answer came as fast and dispassionate as the others, and for some reason I had to stifle a snort. Jesse looked at me and shrugged, done with questions.

  “Okay, Wyatt,” I said in a low voice, but he didn’t break the press yet.

  “Did your people find the drops of blood in that corner of the room?” Wyatt asked, pointing toward the doorway where he’d been standing.


  “Yes.”

  “Whose blood is it?”

  “We don’t know. Same blood type as Schmidt, but we don’t know how it could have gotten all the way across the room. We’ll know more when the DNA goes through.”

  Wyatt looked at me, which broke the press. “That blood isn’t Schmidt’s,” he said quietly. Aaron was swaying a little, looking unmoored.

  “How do you know?” I asked Wyatt.

  The vampire went back to the corner and put his nose right over the carpet, taking a long inhale. “It is male,” he reported. “But it’s young—I can smell the hormones.” He sat back on his heels. “I can also smell the magic in it.”

  Aaron’s confused face somehow clouded over even more. “Magic?”

  I ignored him, focused on Wyatt. “Are you saying—”

  He was already nodding. “Witchblood.”

  I had no idea what that meant, but there wasn’t much else we were going to learn from the house, so Wyatt took Aaron out to his car to get a new evidence seal and to do his final press on Aaron’s memory. Jesse and I waited in the house so he wouldn’t spot us after he’d been pressed.

  “You okay?” I asked Jesse when we were alone. “He was kind of a dick to you.”

  Jesse nodded. “Most of the cops feel like that,” he said, peeling off his gloves with great concentration. “They think I’m a traitor, that I sold out for money and fame. Which is only half-right, I guess.”

  I stepped closer to him, forcing him to look down at me. His eyes were sad. “I thought you were going to be done with all that,” I reminded him. “The pity party ended ages ago.”

  He sighed. “This isn’t me feeling sorry for myself, Scar. I’m just . . .”

  “Guilty?”

  He scrubbed the palm of his hand through his short hair. “More . . . sad, I guess. I really liked being a cop.” Before I could think of a response to that, he changed the subject. “Male witches are pretty rare, right?”

  “Uh, yeah. I need to call Kirsten and find out if the witch who was here tonight was part of her group, but . . .” I made a face. “I think I would remember seeing a teenage male witch at one of their gatherings. As much as I hate to say it, I think this may be connected to the Luparii thing after all. They could have brought the witch with them.”