Bare Bones (8 page)

She was right. I envisioned the strength it would take for one man to dislocate a woman’s hips by hand and shook my head. Maybe if he were a vampire, or some other supernatural creature. If not, there had to be some sort of pulley that he used. Otherwise…no way.

“A lot of blood for those superficial cuts,” Tremelay mentioned.

Shit, he was right. I hadn’t even thought about that, so preoccupied with Amanda’s leg dislocation. Where the heck had all the blood come from? Yes, there were a lot of cuts on her arms, hands, and neck, but not enough for the amount of liquid needed to turn the white carpet that glistening shade of ruby red.

The woman walked forward, stepping carefully, and placed one hand under Amanda’s shoulder. She cautiously turned the body over and we all leaned in. There, on the back of Amanda’s neck, was a large puncture wound.

“But I thought you said she died from having her neck broken?” I stared at the puncture wound, knowing that it would have killed someone within seconds.

“I did. This was postmortem. Very soon postmortem. Soon enough that a few heartbeats pushed out a good bit of blood. Gravity did the rest.”

I didn’t get it. “They must have happened almost simultaneously. Maybe the killer intended to stab her and broke her neck in the process?”

She shrugged. “Maybe. I get the odd feeling that he was trying to drain as much blood out of her as possible after her death.”

“Like a deer?” Norwicki choked out. His face was full of horror. “Like draining a deer to prep for butchering?”

“Well, he didn’t eviscerate her or hang her upside down. Unless he was interrupted before he could get to that, I doubt he was treating her as a trophy kill or potential dinner.”

How these detectives went about their jobs every day, I had no idea. Actually I had no idea how this M.E. woman managed. I’d seen a man who had been skinned, and now this? There really were some sickos out there in the world.

There was something nagging at the back of my mind about this whole thing, but I just couldn’t grasp it. “Do you think the killers were interrupted?” I asked the woman. “I’m assuming she died this morning and was found pretty soon after she died?”

She nodded. “She couldn’t have been dead long. The boyfriend had spent the night and gone to work, but had to come back before he was more than a few miles away to grab some papers he’d forgotten. When he found her, she was still warm. He says he heard a door slam, then looked out to see a man running through the backyard and over the fence.”

I couldn’t imagine running home to retrieve papers and finding my lover dead on the floor. For a brief second I envisioned Dario’s reaction to me naked and murdered in my bedroom. He wouldn’t have called 911. No, the vampire would have taken it upon himself to find my killer and deliver a very slow and painful death. Of course, he wouldn’t have found my body until nightfall. And he wasn’t my boyfriend.

What a weird fantasy to be having at a crime scene. I shook my head and tried to rid my mind of all thoughts of Dario. “And the boyfriend thinks the brother did it?”

Tremelay cleared his throat. I jumped, giving him an apologetic glance. Crap. When did
I
take over the investigation? I was along for the ride. This was a human-on-human crime. Not my thing.

“We’re searching for the backpack,” he told me. “The boyfriend says that the brother had been living here for the last two years ever since their parents died in a car accident. Seems the stereotypical parasite of a younger sibling, sponging off his business-savvy and successful older sister. They had a lot of arguments. Amanda asked him to move out last night. Boyfriend says he was relieved because the brother was a constant source of tension in the house.”

I could imagine. I headed for the bedroom door. “Mind if I check his bedroom?”

Tremelay put out a hand. “No, the techs are in there now. If you want to nose around, it needs to wait until we’re done.”

“Detective!” A voice shouted up from downstairs. “In the garage. We’ve found something.”

Tremelay ran, me right after him. Norwicki had done a moment of indecisive back and forth, then stayed with the body. As we tore through the kitchen and into the garage we saw two officers. One held a backpack, what appeared to be bloody untanned leather spilling from the top. The other stood by a giant white cooler. I craned my neck and saw what appeared to be a side of beef inside the cooler, packed with ice and water.

What the heck? I was seriously having a déjà vu moment here.

“Is that…is that a human skin?” Tremelay looked rather green as he stared at the bloody leather protruding from the backpack.

“Yes, sir,” the tech said. “I’m gonna bag it in the backpack, but we’ll get photos of it laid out once I get it to the morgue.”

I know I had the same slack-jaw, deer-in-headlights look as Tremelay did. Skinned body at the Walters Art Museum. Skin stuffed into a backpack at a house in Canton. And what was in the cooler. “I’m assuming that’s a body in there? That’s not lamb or a gigantic pork loin, is it?”

The tech shook his head. “No, it’s a body. But not the same body. I mean, the body in the cooler is male, and it’s skinned. This skin is male, but it’s younger, like that of a teenager. I didn’t pull it all the way out because I wanted to preserve any trace evidence, but I could tell.”

I felt the weight of Tremelay’s stare on me, and I looked up to meet his eyes. “What do you think, Ainsworth?”

I shrugged, because none of this had anything to do with me. “I think you’ve got a crazy serial killer on your hands, Detective. That’s what I think.”

T
HE FOX WAS
back on top of the Peterson’s book when I got home, but none of the pages had been moved. Hoping for the best, I started to read about chupacabras. As interesting as it was, I kept thinking of what we’d found at the house in Canton and texting little notes to Tremelay. He hadn’t responded, so either he was out of pocket or ignoring me. Probably the latter.

Did the John Doe from the museum have a broken neck too?

Puncture wound to the back of the neck?

Hips dislocated?

Was skinning cleanly done, or evidence of defensive wound/knife cuts?

I figured it would take a while for the medical examiner’s office to get around to the bodies, and skin, from the Canton house, but hopefully they’d performed the autopsy on the John Doe. If we could just figure out what was similar and what was different between them, maybe we’d have a direction to go in. Right now other than cross comparing medical implant records and missing person’s reports, and searching for Bradley Lewis as a “person of interest” we had nothing to go on.

We. When would I get it through my thick head that this was a human serial killer? As intriguing as it all was, I was a Templar and a part-time barista. Tremelay was kind enough to loop me in as a friend. That was it.

And he was busy. I needed to stop texting him and continue to read about chupacabras.

I was just starting to get to the intriguing part, where Peterson discussed the times chupacabra had been mistaken for werewolves, when there was a knock on my door. The book had amazing full-color, detailed photography of the corpses of each, pointing out the differences in physiology as well as hair patterns, so I was reluctant to answer it. Janice always texted before she came over. Dario wouldn’t be here during daylight hours and he just opened the door and let himself in anyway. Whoever it was could just go away.

Another knock. “Solaria, I know you’re in there. Answer the door.”

The last person I ever expected was at my door—my mother. I practically dropped the book on the floor in my haste to let her in, all sorts of horrible scenarios running through my mind. We Templars were pretty good about keeping in touch via modern communication methods, but certain things required a personal visit—things like sharing the news of a family death.

Oh, God. My Dad? He always seemed so healthy, but things happened. It couldn’t be Essie. My great-grandmother was probably one-thirty if she was a day, but I honestly expected her to outlive us all. Besides, I’d just spoken to her yesterday. Jet? Oh, not Athena’s new daughter. We’d had a huge family party two weeks ago when she and Pietrus got home from Korea with her. I thought of the little girl’s thick black hair that stood out from her head like one of those troll dolls, her round, pinchable cheeks, her sweet, rosy bow of a mouth. Not Jet.

I threw open the door and stared mute with panic at my mother.

She didn’t look sad, she looked stern. And that sent a wave of relief through me that nearly brought me to my knees. I was used to stern Mom. Heck, that’s about all I’d gotten from her since I’d refused to take my Oath. She wasn’t here to tell me of a loved one’s death, she was here to pester me about something, and when Mom had
that
look on her face, she was hard to resist.

I was one of the few who ever successfully resisted, stubborn intractable child that I was.

Moving aside to let Mom in, I suddenly realized how absolutely unprepared I was for visitors. Trusty took up the majority of my kitchen counter. The sink was full of dirty dishes—most of them coffee cups. Clothing lay across the back of my sofa, hooked on chairs, puddled on the floor. It looked like I had a habit of disrobing as I walked about my apartment and just leaving my clothing where they dropped—which actually was the truth. I lived alone, and modesty wasn’t my thing. I twisted my T-shirt in my hands, suddenly regretting I’d chosen to wear the one with giant red lips emblazoned across the front.

Mom looked down at my T-shirt and I swear I saw a smirk before she carefully schooled her face into one of cool determination. “This is a nice little apartment, Solaria. You’ve made it quite homey.”

By which she meant it was just like the mess I’d kept of my room back home. Oh well. One of the advantages of being an adult was being able to have a week’s worth of dirty coffee cups in the sink and throwing your clothes all over the place.

“I’d have cleaned a bit if I knew you were coming.” I moved a few piles of books off the sofa. “Sit. Can I get you something to drink? I can make a pot of coffee. Or wine?”

I didn’t normally have wine, but knowing Dario was going to be out of town for a while had driven me to an impulsive purchase of Chianti. I envisioned myself pouring a glass each night, an hour after sunset, as a sort of nod to whatever the heck we had going on. And they say I’m not romantic.

My mother sat on the sofa, looking over the research books I had on the coffee table. “I’ll have some wine.”

Ugh. That Chianti had cost me a fortune, way more than I’d usually spend for wine. Outside of Emergency Beer, I didn’t buy the pricey stuff. My wine usually came in boxes—the cheaper the better.

I went into the kitchen, trying to turn my reluctance to share my wine into a proper sense of hostesslike graciousness. I’d scolded Tremelay for not sharing the cookies. I should be willing to let my own mother have a glass of Chianti.

In all honesty I was broke. I needed to face the fact that I couldn’t make it here in Baltimore on a part-time barista’s salary. The vampire money was down to a few hundred and I needed that for next month’s rent, not expensive wine. Sadly being Baltimore’s Templar didn’t come with donations from the city, and Tremelay had never offered any kind of payment for my supernatural advisory experience. Not that he could probably get that sort of thing past the city accounting office anyway.

I should just take the stipend money my parents deposited into a checking account for me. Heck, there had to be over ten grand in there by now since I hadn’t touched it in seven months. I hated sponging off my parents like that but I
was
doing Templar stuff here—just not stuff that any other Templar had done for hundreds of years.

Which is why I hadn’t taken my Oath. Oath equated to Knighthood which equated to a generous allowance commiserate with level. Sounded great until I read the fine print and realized that I’d be at the beck and call of the Elders, researching what they wanted me to research, guarding the Temple when they said so, going to retrieve artifacts with only a moment’s notice. I’d be owned, and I wasn’t about to be owned.

“Here you go.” I handed Mom a glass of wine and sat down beside her, curling my fingers around the fine crystal of my own glass. Silently I looked over to the window, across the rooftops to the north of the city.
This one’s for us
.

It might not be an hour after sunset, but it was the thought that counted, right?

“I see you’re looking into chupacabra,” Mom commented, looking down at the Peterson book. “I took one out in Puerto Rico a few years back. Nasty thing. Much taller and bulkier than the werewolves up in the Appalachian Mountains. They usually have a set of spikes that run from their shoulders to mid-back. Not always, though. There are a group in southern California that look more like overgrown coyotes with a bad case of mange.”

“That was a chupacabra in Puerto Rico?” I asked. “You never said.”

Mom was a Guardian and most of her responsibilities lay with the Temple and the Holy Lands, but every now and then a Guardian was sent off to dispatch a troublesome supernatural creature. Templars had become rather live-and-let-live about the monsters we would have killed centuries ago, but when one threatened a religious institution we stepped in.

Who was I kidding? It was all about the money. If a city or a Cardinal waved a bunch of “donations” in our face, we were happy to go kill chupacabra in Puerto Rico. Things hadn’t really changed all that much since the Crusades.

“Yeah. Nasty thing. Hope I don’t ever have to face a nest of them again. There was a moment in that fight when I wasn’t sure I was going to make it.” She sighed and took a sip of her wine. “Wow, this is really nice, Solaria. Excellent choice.”

And that was my mother, casually discussing her near-death experience at the claws of a violent goat-sucker, then praising my selection of wine in the next breath.

I loved her. I admired her and growing up I’d wanted to be just like her. I guess I kind of was, in my own not-a-Knight way. Same sword, different path.