Sucker Punch

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  “They didn’t look that tall to me.”

  “You’ve never had to wear stilettos,” I said.

  He frowned at me. “What has that got to do with anything?”

  “Once you’ve worn enough high heels, you’re a better judge of them on other people, that’s all. Just like I didn’t realize the husband was slumping, and you did.”

  “I’m tall and a man. I notice height in other men.”

  “They’ll never agree to letting us take prints of their feet,” I said.

  “They might if Duke told them it was to clear them of suspicion. Since we found them in the house stealing, they’re now suspects,” Newman said.

  “Maybe, but only if they’re not guilty.”

  “I was regular police for two years before I became a marshal. Trust me, Blake, guilty people do a lot of stupid things, just like innocent people.”

  “I’ve been a lot of things, but never a regular cop, so if you tell me that it’s worth a try for them to possibly implicate themselves, I’ll vote with you.”

  “Thanks. I appreciate the vote of confidence.”

  “You’re welcome.” I glanced at the bedroom and finally let myself go inside to see if I could find anything else that would buy us more time. I couldn’t really see either Muriel or Todd walking barefoot through Ray’s blood. It was one thing to walk through your brother’s blood in shoes, but barefoot was more hard-core. Of course, if they’d killed him and framed their nephew, what was a little barefoot promenade compared to a double murder? Because make no mistake: If we couldn’t get Bobby free of this, he was going die within days of the man who raised him.

  12

  I STARED DOWN at the bed. The bedspread was crumpled to one side of the bed along with most of the pillows. The sheets were so tangled that it was impossible to imagine anyone sleeping in them or on them without smoothing them out first. There was blood on them, but not as much blood as had been on Bobby’s skin when we saw him in jail.

  “There’s a little bit of blood where someone touched the sheets, but the front of his body is way more coated than that,” I said.

  “Did you notice that it was down one leg past the knee?” Newman asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “So how did he get into bed without getting more blood on the sheets?”

  “He could have just sat down on the edge of the bed and lain back,” I said.

  Newman shook his head. “If he used his hands to scoot backward, then the blood that covered his hands would have left more marks.”

  “And if he crawled into bed, then the blood on his leg and feet would have marked the sheets more,” I said.

  “Exactly.”

  “Like you said earlier, the blood evidence is wrong.”

  “I saw that, but it didn’t occur to me that those weren’t Bobby’s footprints. I should have realized that if part of the blood evidence was wrong, then it was all fucked.”

  “Don’t beat yourself up, Newman. None of us sees everything all at once. That’s why in a normal murder case you have so much time to look over the evidence before trial.”

  “But this isn’t a trial, Blake. It’s an execution.”

  “Not yet it’s not,” I said.

  “I don’t want to take Bobby’s life if he didn’t do this.”

  “I don’t want anyone to take his life if he was framed for this murder.”

  “People don’t frame other people outside of murder mysteries,” Newman said. “They blame other people, but they don’t actually frame specific people.”

  “They do to throw suspicion off of themselves sometimes,” I said.

  “Maybe in Agatha Christie mysteries,” he said.

  “Are you on board with this being a frame or not?” I asked, looking at him.

  “It just seems so elaborate. I mean, if they’d just killed Ray and then found Bobby with blood on him, that would have been enough.”

  “Crime makes people stupid, and committing murder makes them insecure, so they have to overdo it, I guess.”

  “But they had to know that footprints are as individual as fingerprints,” he said.

  “I bet most people don’t know that, but maybe they were counting on you just pulling the trigger on Bobby and not overthinking it. Once he’s dead, then the case is over. The carpet gets cleaned or ripped out and replaced. The room where the murder happens gets deep-cleaned, and all the evidence, real or fake, just goes away.”

  “Murders when I was just a uniform cop meant everything got bagged and tagged and saved for trial. It was worth your badge to mess up potential evidence. Now it’s like none of it matters except hunting down the killer and executing them.”

  “By the time we’re called in, there are usually a lot of bodies in the morgue, Newman. Our job was designed because putting vampires and wereanimals in regular jail to await trial didn’t work, because they used supernatural powers to escape, usually causing the death of even more people on the way out the door.”

  “I know that, Blake. It’s one of the reasons I wanted to become a marshal in the first place.” His words were okay, but the tone and his face weren’t.

  “Sounds like you’re having second thoughts about your career change,” I said.

  He looked surprised and just stared at me for a second. “It’s like now, this case. There’s only one person dead, so it’s an eye for an eye, but we both think that someone is using the system, using our job, to commit a second murder, because they know if we believe Bobby is guilty, he’s a dead man.”

  “Yeah, there’s a lot of room for corruption and miscarriage of justice in the system,” I said.

  He stared at me again. “You say that so matter-of-fact, as if it’s just business as normal.”

  “It is, Newman.”

  “How can that be okay?”

  “I didn’t say it was okay. I said it was normal. A lot of what people take for normal is very not okay.”

  “Then I don’t understand,” he said.

  “It doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad or sucks ass. It only matters that we do our jobs to the best of our abilities.”

  “I don’t think I can kill Bobby Marchand. I don’t think he did this,” Newman said.

  “Then let’s get some of the forensic people that are coming to help bag and tag on the theft charges for the wicked aunt and uncle to make a print of the footprints that we can use to either get a stay of execution for Bobby or prove that he’s a great liar and guilty.”

  “What do you mean by the great-liar part?”

  “If these are his footprints, then he woke up next to his uncle’s body and walked in human form from there to his own bedroom to pretend to be passed out hard enough that you and the sheriff carried him ‘unconscious’”—I made air quotes around the last word—“to the jail. That’s some Oscar-worthy acting.”

  “I’d swear he was out cold, Blake. I’ve seen a few other humans that passed out after the change. They were out of it. You could burn a house down around them, and they wouldn’t wake up to save themselves.”

  “I know. I’ve seen it, too.” In my head I thought, Not in a few years. I’d been hanging around with too many powerful shapeshifters. Once you reached a certain power level, you didn’t pass out when you went back to human. You could be tired, but it wasn’t the coma state that new shapeshifters fell into or, like Bobby, never outgrew. It meant he was a seriously low-level cat. No wonder he hadn’t wanted to stay with whatever leopard group had trained him to control his beast. No one wants to be the lowest man or woman on the totem pole.

  “I don’t think he could fake that,” Newman said.

  “And I’d swear that his emotions in the jail were real, but if these turn out to be his footprints, then he lied, and he fooled both of us.”

  “Even if he lied, even if he did this—and I still don’t t
hink he did—I’m not sure I can look Bobby in the eyes and pull the trigger.”

  “Well, that’s honest,” I said.

  “Have you had to kill someone you knew?”

  I nodded. “It sucks.”

  “It sucks. That’s the best you can do?”

  “What do you want from me, Newman? Do you want to know that his face haunts my nightmares? Do you want me to cry on your shoulder and say, ‘Woe is me’?”

  “Knowing you have nightmares actually makes me feel better about my own.”

  “Well, then, yay for you, Newman, but fuck you, too.”

  “Why are you mad at me?”

  “Because I didn’t come here to do therapy with you. I came to help you save Bobby Marchand if we can.”

  “I agree that’s our priority,” he said.

  “Good, and if you need therapy help, find a counselor or a doctor. Like I said, I’m seeing someone to help with a lot of issues, not just the job. No shame in getting help when something’s broken,” I said.

  “But you’re mad at me for wanting to confide in you?”

  “No, I’m mad at you for wanting me to trot out my inner demons so that you’ll feel better about your own. I don’t owe you that.”

  “Is anger always your go-to emotion?” he asked, sounding angry himself.

  “Yeah, it is, because anger will help me keep moving until the job is done. Sadness won’t. Grief won’t. Anxiety won’t. All those touchy-feely emotions that are supposed to be what make us human or whole or whatever will cripple you in the middle of a battle.”

  “This isn’t battle,” he said.

  “Fuck that, it’s not. We are fighting for Bobby’s life. It’s a battle between good and evil, Newman, and we’re the good guys, so we have to win.”

  The anger just leaked away from him, and he got a soft look on his face that I didn’t understand. “You still believe we’re the good guys even after all the lives you’ve taken?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Even when they cry for help and beg you not to kill them?” he asked, and his eyes filled with the horror of it.

  We did not have time for this, but in a way, we didn’t have time to ignore it. I finally realized that Newman had asked me here to save more than just Bobby. Damn it. “Those are bad,” I said finally.

  “Monsters aren’t supposed to beg for their lives and say they’re sorry,” he said, his face still holding the horror of that moment when he began to question if he was the monster. I remembered my moment. Hell, I was still having them.

  “Everything wants to live, Newman, even monsters.”

  He looked at me, frowning, and the bad memories in his eyes began to fade, replaced by that dogged determination to learn, to get better, to listen, that was one of his best qualities as a marshal.

  “I’ve had a vampire beg me not to kill her while she was covered in the blood of her victims. It wasn’t her fault. Her master made her do it,” I said.

  “Was it true? Did her master make her do it?”

  “Maybe, or maybe vampires are just like any criminal. It’s never their fault. You were a regular cop for a couple of years. Did you ever arrest someone who believed they were guilty and deserved the punishment?”

  He thought about it, then shook his head. “No, either they didn’t do it, or it wasn’t their fault. They’d blame the victim. If she had given me her purse, I wouldn’t have had to hit her. If my husband hadn’t cheated on me, I wouldn’t have stabbed him. Or my favorite: the man who kept saying, ‘I hit her before, and she never died.’ He just kept saying that as if it was a defense of some kind. It was like he really believed that she’d died out of spite, just to put him in jail. He slammed her head into the edge of a metal table until her brains leaked out the front of her skull, but it wasn’t his fault that the bitch died.” Newman was angry as he said the last, righteously angry at the everyday evil of it.

  “Now, think what that abusive shit would have said if you could have legally aimed a gun and killed him there and then.”

  I watched the anger deepen as he said, “He’d have said, ‘Why you killing me? What’d I do? It’s not my fault the bitch died.’”

  “Turning into vampires or werewolves or whatever doesn’t stop them from being the people they were before. If they were evil and petty before, they’re still evil and petty afterward.”

  “What about the nice model citizens that turn evil after they become vampires?” he asked.

  “You know that old saying ‘power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely’?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “I think a lot of people are only nice because they don’t think they have a choice. Give them supernatural powers, the ability to control people with just their gaze, and they don’t have to play nice anymore. They can take what they want, so they do. Of course, all that is predicated on them being undead long enough to regain their minds. The newly risen aren’t deep thinkers.”

  “New vampires are like rabid animals. They kill everything they find,” Newman said, and again there was that haunted look in his eyes.

  “Yeah, the newly undead need a master to control them. There are rules in place that if you turn someone into a vampire, you have to stay with them until they gain enough control to function safely. If you abandon them, the other masters will hunt you down and make sure you don’t do it again, or they did in the old days before law enforcement was supposed to do it for them.”

  “Sometimes I wish it was the old days,” he said, voice low.

  “Sometimes me, too,” I said.

  “Really?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “You wouldn’t be marrying Jean-Claude if it was the old days,” he said.

  “There is that,” I said, and smiled, thinking about my tall, pale, and gorgeous fiancé.

  Newman smiled back at me, which meant maybe I could stop hand-holding and get us back to business.

  “Do you still do morgue stakings?” he asked.

  “No, vampires chained down, dead to the world, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. I leave the easy kills to the new marshals.”

  “It’s not easy when it’s nightfall and they’re begging for their lives.”

  I counted to ten, because I went right back to being angry. It was my go-to emotion and had been since my mother died or maybe even before. I just couldn’t remember me that clearly before my mother’s death. I was only eight when it happened.

  “Refuse the morgue stakings and tell any new marshals that they don’t have to agree to nighttime morgue kills.”

  “I didn’t know we had a choice.”

  “We’re the vampire experts. All you have to do is tell the local cops that it’s too dangerous when they’re awake. You don’t want anyone to get caught by the vampire gaze. Or, as a more senior marshal, you can literally say you’re leaving the less dangerous assignments for the newbies.”

  “I’ll try that next time.” His face was all serious, but his head was so not in the game.

  “When all this is over, I’ll be happy to sit down over coffee and talk. I’ll share all the tips I’ve learned over the years for keeping the personal horror level low, or as low as possible on this job, but right now we have work to do. Bobby needs you, Newman. I need you present and accounted for, not lost in the nightmares. Can you do that?”

  He nodded, taking a big breath and letting it out in a big rush. “You’re right. We have to try to buy time for Bobby. I’ll take you up on that coffee later.” He shoved the anger down so that his eyes were almost friendly as he looked at me. “Let’s go see if the state forensic people are here yet.”

  His voice was even, unemotional, except for that lingering anger. If I hadn’t known he’d take it wrong, I’d have patted him on the back and said Atta boy. Men stuff their emotions because life and death are more
important than any emotion. If you don’t survive, then what the fuck does it matter? I was one of the boys in more ways than one. I’d teach Newman how to survive; any emotional damage from the survival was someone else’s job.

  13

  NEWMAN AND I, along with some of the state police and Sheriff Leduc, were almost having a fight in the living room of the Marchand mansion, aka the crime scene. The living room was the size of my first three apartments combined, with elegant furniture done in silky-looking brocade in shades of pink, cream, and pale mint green. The carpet was deep burgundy with hints of the same pale colors swirling in shapes that I think were supposed to be flowers. There were real oil paintings on the walls, and I’d have bet that all the knickknacks were real antiques. It looked more like a movie set than any living room I’d ever seen, so maybe it was a drawing room. There were chairs, two couches, and a love seat, but none of us was sitting down. I think we were all afraid to muss the furniture.

  “You cannot put one of our people in the cell with a wereanimal that is already suspected of killing someone,” Captain Dave Livingston of the state cops declared loudly. He wasn’t quite yelling yet, but he was getting more forceful every time he said no.

  The urge to say Captain Livingston, I presume was very strong. His parents had actually named him David Livingston, like the famous missionary and explorer, even though the last names weren’t spelled the same. The original was Livingstone, but they were pronounced the same, so he’d probably heard the joke a bajillion times. It made it easier for me to resist.

  It had seemed like such a simple idea to get prints from Bobby Marchand to compare to the ones at the house, and half of it was simple. The forensic team from the state police was happy to collect evidence at the house, but we needed evidence from Bobby’s body. At minimum we needed his feet to be printed, and that meant either one of the techs went inside the cell with him, or he came out of the cell to us.

  “I will not let that monster out of the cell and endanger anyone else,” Sheriff Leduc said, also not quite yelling.

  “Well, you’re not endangering one of my people by sending them in with a shapeshifter,” Livingston said.