Bare Bones (7 page)

Thorough, and he had witnesses to his alibi. But there still was time after he’d left the museum to have killed and skinned the victim. I was assuming he had keys to the building, and that his wife might not notice that he’d arrived home closer to two than twelve thirty or one.

Wait. He wasn’t a suspect. He was supposedly the victim by his knee replacement ID. The guy probably had nothing to do with this. Tremelay had him here just to gather information, not accuse the man. As Huang had said, he could hardly have removed his own implant and put it in the victim. This was just a bizarre coincidence.

Tremelay obviously felt the same. He noted the man’s comments, then stood, thanking him for coming in. The detective was escorting him to the door just as the officer arrived with the man’s soda.

Huang took it and nervously fiddled with the pull tab, then followed Tremelay out of the interview room.

“What do you think?” Norwicki asked.

I shrugged. “Someone screwed up coding the guy’s medical device. Probably someone getting a knee replacement the same week as our victim.”

Norwicki nodded in agreement. “Try convincing Tremelay that. He’s gonna be a dog with a bone on this case, and the man doesn’t believe in coincidences.”

The detective might not, but I couldn’t see how this was anything else. No other explanation made sense. We were looking for a psychotic killer who skinned his victim, and I truly doubted Brian Huang had anything to do with the murder, in spite of his eccentricities.

N
ORWICKI AND I
had reopened the cookie box and helped ourselves by the time Tremelay made it back in.

“Hey,” he protested, shutting the lid after grabbing another chocolate chip for himself. “Well, Huang was a bust, and we’re back to square one. I still think something is fishy with that guy, though.”

Norwicki gave me a knowing look reached for another cookie, jerking his hand back as two beeps went off. Like a synchronized water ballet, both detectives checked their cell phones and exchanged tired glances.

“Got a murder, this one with her skin still on,” Norwicki announced as he stowed his cell phone in his pants pocket.

“Yeah,” Tremelay grumbled, looking through the big glass window into the now-empty interview room. “Guess our John Doe has to step aside until we get another lead.” He looked over at me and smiled. “Wanna ride along, Ainsworth? I feel bad that this wasn’t more exciting.”

I had nothing else to do today. “Sure. I think a dead woman is a fair trade for a couple dozen cookies.”

At the mention of the baked goods, both detectives eyed the box. “We won’t be back for hours,” Tremelay announced. “I leave these at the station and there won’t be any left.”

Oh for Pete’s sake. You’d think the guy never had a cookie before in his life. “Share, you selfish pig. You’re gonna get fat if you eat all those cookies yourself.”

Tremelay and Norwicki both instinctively sucked in their stomachs and looked down. Vanity knew no age limit.

“Oh all right.” Tremelay finally capitulated. They each took a few more cookies and deposited the nearly-empty box on a desk just outside the door to the interview room. Within seconds, other cops had descended on it like a pack of piranhas.

We walked out to the unmarked car, Tremelay still chewing over the not-Huang case. “You know if it’s a serial killer, he’s going to kill again. It’s not like this guy wakes up one day and decides to peel the skin off someone then never do it again.”

“Yeah.” Norwicki chimed in. “Even if it’s out of state, it’ll link in. It’s too weird of a murder not to. We’ll get him.”

Tremelay sighed. “Yeah. I guess. I just hate having this one on the board as a John Doe with no leads at all.”

We made our way through the parking lot and I saw Huang next to a car in the visitor space, talking to a young woman. Suddenly he reached out and grabbed her, the pair hugging each other like they had no one else in the world. Their shoulders shook and I realized they were both crying.

His daughter? No, he wasn’t
that
old. The girl looked to be about sixteen, too young to be his wife. My stomach twisted at the thought that Huang could be involved with an underage girl, but their embrace, although emotional, didn’t seem passionate.

“Coming Ainsworth?” Tremelay called, unlocking the door to the unmarked car.

I turned but not before the couple broke apart from their embrace and I saw the girl’s face—the golden-brown hair with pink and blue streaks, the upturned nose, thick black eyeliner, and neon pink lipstick. It was the teenage girl from the Inner Harbor who’d been arguing with her brother outside the oyster shack.

Brian Huang was about as far from a vampire as could be. Either she’d changed her mind, and her gender preference, or they were an odd pair of friends. Suspicious, I grabbed my cell phone and snapped a quick picture of the two, jogging to catch up with Tremelay and Norwicki.

The three of us were settled in the car, me in the backseat, before I remembered I’d left my sword in the trunk of my car. Not that I’d need it. We were heading off to see a routine murder. No need for Trusty there.

“So what’s up with this case?” I asked, breaking the silence and putting the thought of a forty-year-old man and a sixteen-year-old girl out of my mind.

“Amanda Lewis,” Tremelay said. “Twenty-eight. Made a bunch of money in short-sales when she was barely old enough to buy a beer. She’s a financial analyst, but does pretty well day trading, evidently.”

Norwicki snorted. “I should be so lucky. My 401k looks like a kid’s lunch money.”

Dead at twenty-eight didn’t sound so lucky to me. “So…? Jealous boyfriend goes homicidal? Robbery gone bad? She spend all that money on coke and tried to stiff her dealer?”

Both detectives shrugged. “Boyfriend is the one that found her,” Tremelay said. “Judging from the hysteria on the 911 call, I’d say he’s not a suspect. He thinks it has something to do with her brother. Says he saw a man running from the scene, and is pretty sure it was him.”

I looked out the window at the tightly spaced rows of narrow, tall houses, the shadows of the harbor in the distance. The container ships looked so small from here, the rows of gantry cranes at the port like bowlegged stick figures. We made a left, heading north and still east. This neighborhood looked vaguely familiar, but I hadn’t been paying attention early on and still wasn’t familiar enough with the city to know where I was.

“Who knows,” Norwicki said. “Brother could have been in a gang. Maybe the sister saw something she shouldn’t have. Or maybe he had racked up debts and was robbing his sister when she came home early from work.”

She was killed in her house. It seemed an odd place for a gang to do a hit. We were heading to the more affluent eastern neighborhoods. I couldn’t see a bunch of boyz-in-the-hood driving here and storming into a charming Cape Cod with guns blazing. Unless it was vampires. I shivered, hoping with all my might that vampires weren’t involved with this murder.
Please Lord do not let me be on the opposite side of a murder from Dario.
We’d just gotten back on good terms after the necromancer thing last month. I didn’t want our friendship—or whatever the heck we had—threatened by a dead day trader in Canton.

Canton. I blinked as I realized where we were and why I was recognizing the scenery. In fact, I was
really
recognizing the scenery. Then I went into a state of astonishment as we pulled into a very familiar driveway.

Good Lord. “I know this house. Tremelay, I was here yesterday. I met this Amanda woman as well as her brother, Bradley.”

Tremelay put the car in park, and the two detectives swiveled their heads to stare at me in the backseat. I applauded their synchronicity of movement, the similarity of expression. It was almost as if Tremelay and Norwicki had been practicing the move for weeks. I guess that’s what happened when you spent more time with your partner than you did with your spouse.

“You
know
Amanda Lewis?”

Wow, they even spoke in harmony. Amazing.

“Yes. My friend is a reporter and she was here doing a piece on an exorcism. Amanda was convinced that a demon had possessed her brother because he’d started eating meat, doing his own laundry and was looking for a job. She even called a priest in.”

Norwicki blinked, his mouth open. “Hell, I’d be jumping for joy if my brother started looking for a job, not calling in a priest.”

“She sounds like a nutjob,” Tremelay growled. “Maybe her brother
did
kill her for nagging him all the time. Can’t say I hadn’t thought about it a few times with some of my sisters.”

I didn’t know any of Tremelay’s sisters, but judging from his selfishness with the cookies
I
bought, I was thinking they might have had a good reason to nag him.

“Anyway…” I glared at the two detectives. “The priest threw a bunch of holy water on the brother. Nothing happened. Then the brother left to go to a job interview.”

It all came back to me in Technicolor—us leaving abruptly because the brother had suddenly turned into smarmy player-boy the moment he saw my tattoo, the stupid white carpeting everywhere. I wondered if Amanda was killed in a room with the white carpeting. I hoped for her sake it had been somewhere with easier clean-up. I could completely see the woman haunting her killer if he caused her to bleed all over the thick, white plush floor covering.

Bradley. Sympathetic at first then a complete creeper. I thought of the Rabid Rabbit shirt he’d had to change after it became wet with holy water. I remembered the oak floors of his bedroom that matched his furniture to a “T”. I remembered my foot hitting his backpack, the feel of it squish as if he’d filled it with soggy clothing or Jell-O.

Slow-motion, like a film replay, I again saw my foot hit the backpack. It was the same foot, the same shoe that was drying in kitchen sink because it had been stained with blood.

“Guys? I think maybe the boyfriend is right. I think Bradley
is
involved in his sister’s death.” I relayed the details of the squishy backpack and my blood-stained shoe.

“Are you sure?” Norwicki asked. “Maybe you accidently kicked a dead possum crossing Pratt Street. It happens.”

Ew. No, it didn’t happen. “I think I would have noticed that. I’m not positive one hundred percent that the blood was from the backpack, but I’m pretty sure.”

“Okay.” Tremelay unbuckled his belt and shifted in his seat as he opened the door. “We’ll make sure we look for the brother’s backpack in the house and have the techs run it through for trace. Ready?”

We slid out of the car. The neighbors were conspicuously outside, trying to look like they weren’t gawking while they pruned manicured hedges or nearly wiped the paint off their car in endless circles over the same spot. A few had given up pretending and just stood with their arms across their chest, lips tight as they watched. Tremelay’s car was parked half-in the drive, flanked on either side by marked cruisers. Two officers stood outside, ensuring the neighbors kept their gawking to their own side of the property line.

Neither of the detectives had to flash badges. The uniformed officers gave them a nod of recognition, narrowing their eyes at me as I followed Tremelay and Norwicki inside. Not having a badge or my sword, I instead flashed the Templar tattoo on my wrist, which earned me a nod of acknowledgement. It seems Tremelay had been talking and had spread news of me around the station. I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not.

The white carpet in the foyer and living room was pristine, but as we made our way up the stairs and to the master bedroom, I saw my hopes for Amanda’s eternal rest were dashed. Her body lay twisted on the ground, white carpet stained bright red in a lopsided circle around her torso. The padding underneath must have been thick, because I knew how much blood the human body held (thank you vampires) and it all seemed to have been soaked up pretty much directly under her body.

I’d thought she was a crazy pain in the butt when I’d met her yesterday, but now I felt a pang of remorse as well as guilt for my uncharitable thoughts. No matter how unlikeable I found their personality, no one deserved to die like this. Amanda was naked, her legs twisted unnaturally as if they’d been dislocated at the hip. Her arms and hands were covered with slash-marks. Defensive wounds? I couldn’t really tell. They weren’t the only knife marks. There were also ones along her neck and shoulders, as if someone has slashed in a parallel fashion to her body rather than stab at her.

“How’d she die?” My voice was husky. I’d seen dead bodies before. A month ago I’d seen so many dead bodies I’d become rather numb to the experience, but something about this woman’s death seemed so wrong.

“Neck snapped,” a tall woman by the bed announced. Others around her were taking pictures or bagging items with tweezers. She stood like Pharaoh commanding the slaves, latex covering her hands and feet as she made notes on a clipboard. “Cuts were perimortum by my initial impression.”

“And her hips?” I’d seen my share of knife wounds and blood, but the angle of her legs kept drawing my eyes like a horrible magnet.

“Before death.”

I choked back bile. The idea of a woman—a financial analyst, day-trader, brother-nagging woman—having her legs dislocated at the hip, then fighting off an attacker with a knife for God-knows how long until having her neck snapped? In a way it seemed just as horrific as the death magic sacrifices last month. Worse, actually.
Both
legs dislocated at the hip? I knew how strong those muscles were, how big those joints and ligaments were. It must have been excruciating. It must have been damned near impossible.

“How the heck did someone dislocate both her legs?” I had to ask. And I had to look around the bedroom for any sign of a medieval rack or a couple of truck winches.

“I’ll know more when I get her back to the morgue,” the woman said, tapping her pen against the clipboard. “The boyfriend’s story was one guy running from the scene, so this would have been difficult to do. The killer might have brought along some kind of device, but then how could he hold a struggling woman down and hook her up to equipment meant to pull her legs out of joint? Either he was inhumanly strong, or there two assailants.”