Sucker Punch

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  The pictures went through the centuries. A lot of the family was blond. There were a couple of redheads, then a brunette or two, but they were predominantly pale of hair, skin, and eye. I guessed if you kept marrying among your white-bread roots, that was what you ended up with, but it bothered me. Maybe I was letting my own personal issues interfere? Probably. I’d been dealing with my family more than normal because of the wedding planning. My stepmother, Judith, was as blond and blue-eyed as her daughter, as my father, and as their shared son, my half brother. I was the only dark, ethnic note in their German white bread, and Judith had never, ever let me forget it. She’d been so rude about it that by the time we were teenagers, Andrea, Judith’s daughter from her first marriage, had started correcting the racism in front of her mother and whomever she was talking to. Andrea and I had never really gotten along that well, so I’d been surprised that she’d come to my defense. In hindsight I wasn’t sure she’d been defending me as much as she was just embarrassed by her mother’s obvious white-supremacy leanings. Either way, it had left me with an ethnic chip on my shoulder that I never let Judith forget.

  “Here’re Bobby and his parents,” Newman said, pointing.

  There was a smiling couple with a baby and then a picture of them with a slightly older version of the baby. The next picture of the baby was with a man alone, just him and the baby.

  “Is this Ray Marchand with baby Bobby?” I asked.

  “Yes, those are the last of the older photos.”

  Newman led me back to the office area. There was a smaller corner table between the file cabinets and the desk that I’d overlooked, too busy looking at the blood and mayhem. There were pictures of Ray with a progressively older boy. Bobby at somewhere between six and eight, holding up a bigmouth bass almost as big as he was, a huge grin showing that he was missing some of his baby teeth. Ray was helping him hold the fish, a look of pure happiness and pride on his face. There were pictures of them with skis someplace cold, and then there was a wedding photo: Ray Marchand with a statuesque woman so beautiful, she didn’t look real. From cheekbones to carefully waved hair, she was model perfect, movie-star gorgeous. Her hair was black, her skin the color of coffee with cream in it. Bobby stood beside her in a tiny tailored tuxedo complete with tails that looked to be a match to the one that Ray was wearing. His smile was flashing the same missing teeth as the fishing photo. He had a white cushion in his hands held loosely so that if the rings really had been on it, they’d have rolled away. I guess that’s why there’s a ribbon on ring bearer pillows. The easiest choice for Jean-Claude and my wedding party had been the ring bearer. There was a little girl clinging to the side of Ray’s pants leg. The girl was younger than Bobby, so maybe four or five? She looked like a tiny replica of her mother, except her black hair was a short mass of curls and her skin tone had less cream to it and more coffee. There were no other pictures from the wedding. Maybe Ray and his new bride had been as tired of the drama llamas in their lives as I was, and just said Screw it. We’ll have a flower girl and a ring bearer and be done. Of course, the flower girl position in our wedding had turned into a hotbed of drama, so maybe we’d just have a ring bearer and be done.

  There were pictures of all four of them in the summer with a lake behind them, all smiling and happy. Ray was holding the little girl, and the woman had her hands on Bobby’s shoulders. Without any obvious makeup, the woman was still gorgeous, just less dramatic. Close-ups showed her eyes were a startling shade of green. The daughter’s eyes were a deep, rich brown, but except for that, she looked remarkably like her mother. The pictures jumped around in the years as if they’d been arranged more for ease of viewing than for chronology, or maybe favorites were in front. A picture of Ray with his wife entwined in a hug, both of them laughing, wasn’t a professional photo, but it had been blown up and placed in the center of it all. The family photo beside it was of the four of them in bathing suits still wet from the Caribbean blue sea that gleamed around them. The kids were teenagers in that photo, and both Ray and his wife were in great shape. They looked like a happy, healthy, outdoorsy, athletic family. There were pictures of the two children growing up—Christmases, Easters, school track meets with them both winning ribbons, Bobby in football gear with his teammates holding a trophy. It took me a few minutes to realize one of the cheerleaders in the shot was the daughter. Then there was a photo of Ray and the girl jogging with a leopard bounding alongside them like a dog. Another picture had the girl lying back with her head against the leopard’s side, its head turned so that his furred cheek was against her black curls. The leopard had bright yellow eyes. The photos of just Ray and the children seemed not to care if Bobby was in human form or animal. I’d never seen any family treat someone’s beast form so casually. I liked that a lot, but I also liked that there were almost no professionally posed shots in the entire collection of photos. Maybe professionals had taken some of them, but they were remarkably candid looking, moments of people’s lives frozen and happy. They seemed more like real memories than the stiff family photos that marched up the wall by the stairs in my father’s house. It made me think about the photos that Jean-Claude wanted for the wedding. Was there such a thing as unposed, natural-looking professional photos?

  “They looked happy,” I said, at last realizing I’d probably looked at the photos longer than I would have at most crime scenes. “Do you know what happened to the wife?”

  “Her name was Angela Warren.”

  I frowned. “Why does that name sound familiar?”

  “I’m surprised you didn’t recognize her in the wedding photo,” he said.

  “Did you?” I asked.

  He looked almost embarrassed. “One of my favorite movies as a kid was her one and only starring role in an action flick.”

  “Oh, yeah, The Model and the Spy or something like that.”

  “Model Spy,” Newman said.

  “Why was it her one and only starring role?” I asked.

  “It became a cult favorite, but when it was first released, apparently it didn’t make that much money.”

  I studied the wedding photo again; she wore more makeup in that one than in any of the other photos. “I should have at least thought I knew her from somewhere.”

  “You weren’t a little boy, so the fact that she got the cover of the swimsuit issue twice probably escaped you,” he said.

  I smiled. “Didn’t she put out an album while she was a model?”

  “She did, and she wrote all the songs on it, plus an extra song that she wrote for her boyfriend at the time, Tucker B.”

  “Him, I know. He does R and B and rap.”

  “He tops the charts in both,” Newman said.

  “You can’t turn on a radio without hearing some of his stuff,” I said.

  “Angela wrote a lot of his biggest hits, and she continued to write for him and other chart-topping singers even after she married Ray and moved here.”

  “What is one of the world’s top models and a singer, songwriter, and actress doing living in Hanuman, Michigan?” I asked.

  Newman chuckled. “I know, right? But Ray and she met in New York or LA at some party that friends had dragged him to while he was traveling for business. He was twice divorced and, according to the local gossip, had vowed never to marry again, but once he met Angela, all that changed.”

  “I remember this. It was in all the tabloids in the supermarket and on the celebrity gossip shows. My stepmother loved those kinds of shows. I was still trapped at home with her in charge of the remote. ‘Backwoods Millionaire Marries Supermodel.’ Wasn’t that one of the headlines?”

  “Yes. The headlines called Ray a recluse, which he wasn’t from all accounts, but they painted him as backwoodsy and primitive as they could.”

  “Didn’t they use photos of him on hunting trips?”

  “Yeah, they made it sound like Angela was marrying Grizzly Adams,” N
ewman said.

  “Do you know how she died?” I asked.

  “Don’t you? It made world headlines.”

  I shook my head.

  “‘Famous Model Mauled to Death by Leopard on African Safari with Her Family’ was one of the news stories,” he said.

  “And it turned out to be a wereleopard, because one of the kids popped for the disease,” I said.

  “I thought you’d remember it for that at least.”

  “I was still in college getting a degree in preternatural biology when it happened. It was the talk of our department, especially for those of us wanting to be field biologists with a specialty in the supernatural.”

  “I never knew that you ever wanted a career outside of law enforcement.”

  “If I hadn’t had the psychic ability to raise the dead as zombies, I’d have probably gone for at least my master’s and been living out in the wilderness somewhere, studying trolls or helping track invasive foreign species like gargoyles.”

  “Why did raising zombies stop you from being a biologist?”

  “A man named Bert Vaughn had started up a company called Animators Inc., where ‘The living raise the dead for a killing’ was the motto at the time. He found out my abilities and offered me a lot more money than any summer job I could find that year. I needed to earn money to help put myself through grad school, and I was also meeting postgrads with their master’s degrees working for five dollars an hour, feeding seals at SeaWorld. It made me realize I’d need at least a doctorate, and that takes money.”

  “So your summer job turned into your career,” he said.

  I nodded.

  “You ever think of going back?”

  “No, not really. I miss camping and the outdoors though. I haven’t been bird-watching in so long, my binoculars are outdated.”

  “Jean-Claude much of a bird-watcher?”

  “No. Even if he wasn’t a vampire, his idea of roughing it is a hotel that doesn’t offer turn-down service.”

  “Haley does like those little chocolates they put on your pillow, but I’m glad she loves the outdoors more.”

  “I tried to find someone to go hiking and camping with me. He has his master’s in preternatural biology, and he’s even a bird-watcher.”

  “What happened?”

  “His self-loathing trumped our love,” I said.

  “Ouch, sorry.”

  I shrugged. “I’m happier now than I’ve ever been in a relationship, so no bitching from me. At least my ex just left in a therapy-rich huff and didn’t die like Ray Marchand and Angela Warren.”

  “He vowed never to marry again, and this time he made it stick,” Newman said.

  “How old was he when he died?”

  “Just turned sixty-five.”

  “Did he continue to hit the gym and take care of himself like in these photos?”

  “Yeah, Ray took care of himself.”

  “Then why was he on medication for arthritis and a bad back? That makes him sound decrepit and old.”

  “I’m not sure which family member told the sheriff that Ray was on medication for pain.”

  “How much other family is there besides Muriel and Todd?”

  “Just Jocelyn and Bobby.”

  “Jocelyn is the girl in the photos?”

  “Yeah, though you’ll hear a lot of people call her Joshie. Apparently, she was a serious tomboy and tried to keep up with Bobby even though he was a couple of years older.”

  I looked at the picture with her reclining against Bobby’s leopard. She looked like a slightly darker version of her mother, which meant she was beautiful. There was an unfinished look to her face that only age and experience would cure, but from the bone structure to the curve of her mouth and the big, dark eyes, she had everything she needed to be devastatingly gorgeous.

  I turned so I’d be where the office chair was. The chair was so out of place that I didn’t have to move it to stand close to the main desk. I’d have rolled it over and sat in it so I could have the actual view that Ray Marchand had when he was working, but in case this turned into an actual murder case with evidence gathering like with a normal crime, I didn’t want to contaminate anything. I was wearing booties and gloves, not a full-on coverall, so no sitting or leaning.

  “He set this room up so that he could see anything that came through the door,” I said.

  “So whoever came through the door to kill him was someone he trusted,” Newman said.

  “Statistically it usually is,” I said.

  “If I believed all the stats on violent crime, I’d be a hermit in the woods and avoid all humans,” Newman said.

  “Look up the stats on death by household accidents. Even living alone is dangerous,” I said, but I was looking out from the desk toward the door as I said it. I’d noticed that detectives did that at crime scenes, talking without looking at you, as if the conversation wasn’t as important as what they were looking at and thinking in their heads. When I started helping the police, I thought it was weird, but now I understood that the conversation was like background music to help your brain work on the niggling idea that’s almost a clue if you can just drag it out into the front of your head. But it’s like the things you see out of the corners of your eyes. If you look directly at them, they vanish.

  “Did you look through the drawers yet?” I asked.

  “No, I mean . . . this was someone I knew.” The tone in his voice made me look at him so I could see the embarrassment on his face.

  “It’s okay, Newman. Was this the first time you’ve seen someone you know dead from violence?”

  He shook his head. “My first was one of the officers that helped train me. He was the first person I saw killed by a wereanimal.” His eyes had closed down, face grim with remembering.

  “Is that why you wanted to become a marshal with our branch?”

  He nodded, face still bleak. That’s the best word I have for his expression. Victims and first responders can look haunted sometimes, but there’s a certain look that only people in uniform who have seen the big bad get in their eyes. Bleak is the closest word I’ve found to what it looks like, even in a mirror.

  “You never forget the first time you see the amount of damage that supernatural strength can do,” I said.

  “Which is one of the things wrong with the way Ray was killed,” he said. The bleakness in his eyes began to fade to something closer to depressed anger or angry depression. You stay on the job long enough, you have your own version of it.

  “I’ve seen the crime scene photos,” I said, “and the murder was bloody and awful, but it didn’t take superstrength to do it.”

  “I admit that when I first saw Ray lying there, all I saw was the blood and the damage to the body. It wasn’t until we started taking pictures to help us get the warrant that I realized the blood wasn’t hiding more damage. Usually there’re pieces torn off, eaten. The victim is savaged, so when they start picking it up to wrap it up for transport, I expect bits to fall off the body.”

  “Yeah, sometimes the damage isn’t obvious until you start trying to move it,” I said.

  “The body was too intact, Blake. It was too . . . whole. I told that to Duke, and he told me I was crazy. Wasn’t Ray’s throat being torn open enough damage?”

  “No,” I said, “it’s not. I’ve never seen a wereanimal kill that was that clean. Vampire yes, but not a shapeshifter.”

  “Exactly,” Newman said.

  “The sheriff says he’s seen what a wereanimal can do. Has he?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, but why would he lie about it?”

  I shrugged. “Some people do.”

  “Duke can brag with the best of them, but he always lets you know when he’s pulling your leg. He’s never claimed expertise he didn’t have to my knowledge.”

  “Maybe
whatever he saw wasn’t someone he knew. That can make a difference,” I said.

  I opened the top left-hand drawer and found the usual office bits and bobs. The drawer below it was deeper and had hanging file folders in it. I’ve worked so few cases where this kind of evidence mattered that I wasn’t entirely sure if I messed with the files whether it would hurt the case later. A warrant of execution covered almost any kind of violence and death, but I wasn’t sure about regular evidence.

  “If the evidence didn’t look like a shapeshifter attack, you’d have gone after the money angle?” I said.

  “You mean, who inherits?” Newman said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Like Muriel and Todd?” he said.

  “Oh, yeah. I’m wondering if messing with the files in the victim’s desk will mess us up if it turns into a financial case.”