Anita Blake 22 - Affliction (16 page)

Though with this many people in the room it was damn near claustrophobic. I felt like I had a wall looming up behind me that kept bending closer. It was actually Dr Shelley who finally turned around and said, ‘Gentlemen, you were allowed to observe, not to breathe down our necks. Now, everybody take two big steps back.’ She pushed her glasses back up on her nose with the back of her gloved hand and glared at them when they didn’t move. ‘This is my part of the crime, my domain; you’re here because I let you be here. If you don’t give us some room to work, then I’ll clear the room, is that understood? Now step the hell away from us.’

I liked her. The men exchanged glances as if waiting to see who would back up first. It was Gonzales who stepped back first, followed by Burke, then the deputies, and finally Rickman. Maybe it wasn’t just me he didn’t like, or maybe it was all women?

‘Thank you, gentlemen,’ she said in a voice that held no grudge. She turned back to me and Dr Rogers. ‘Marshal Blake, now that we can move without bumping into people, do you have any questions?’

Rickman piped up. ‘We want to know what she sees that we didn’t, not just information that you’ve already given us.’

Shelley turned around, and I didn’t have to see her eyes to know she was giving him her cold look. It was a good look, and we’d all seen it a few times already. It was a look that reminded you of that teacher in elementary school who could make thirty kids go silent with a glance, except this look was more hostile.

Rickman took the full weight and gave his own defiant look back; we’d seen that a few times, too. ‘If you feed her information, Sheila, we won’t know if she’s really an asset to this case or just another Fed to get in our way.’

‘This is my morgue, Ricky. I run it the way the way I see fit.’ Her voice was very cold, but the fact that he’d used her first name made me wonder if they’d had more than a working relationship once. Of course, maybe he just wanted to point out that her name was Sheila Shelley. He probably didn’t get to use names that were almost as bad as his own Ricky Rickman very often.

‘She’s supposed to be some hotshot zombie expert; let her prove it,’ he said, undaunted.

‘I can raise zombies from the grave,’ I said. ‘Can anyone else in this room do that?’

There was silence and a couple of nervous looks.

‘Was I not supposed to remind everybody that I raise the dead? Sorry, but it’s a psychic gift. I’d exchange it for something else if I could, but it doesn’t work that way. I make zombies rise from the dead the way some people are left-handed or have the recessive genes for blue eyes. It’s just the way it is; I raised my first one when I was fourteen, so yeah, that makes me a zombie expert, Detective Rickman.’

‘Then like I said, dazzle us, Blake.’

‘Get out of my morgue,’ Dr Shelley said.

‘Now, Sheila,’ he said.

‘Stop using my first name as if that will make us buddies, Detective. You have an issue with women in authority, you always have, and apparently you always will.’ She turned to me. ‘I’m sorry, Marshal, it’s nothing personal, he’s always like this.’

‘How did he make detective this young if he’s always this big a pain in the ass?’ I asked.

‘Unfortunately, when he gets his head out of his ass he’s a really good detective. He solved some big cases early and saved lives by catching the monsters early. I mean murderers, not your kind of monster,’ she said.

I nodded, that I appreciated the difference.

She pointed a gloved finger at Rickman. ‘But right now you are being childish and unhelpful. Sheriff Callahan has helped everyone in this room do their jobs better. He’s saved lives literally and by simply helping all of us do ours. He never grabs credit, but we all know we owe him. Now, we are all going to let the marshal here do her job and respect her expertise with the preternatural, but more than that I hear she’s engaged to Callahan’s son and that means she deserves respect on that account, too, and you, Ricky, will by God give it to her for one of those three reasons. I don’t care which one you pick, but choose one and give her the same credit you’d give a man with the same badge, the same reputation, and the same connection to a wounded officer that we all respect and owe.’

I fought the urge to applaud. Rickman finally looked embarrassed; good to know he could be. The other officers looked shamefaced, too, as if the lecture were somehow contagious, or as if Rickman had made them all look bad. Either way, Rickman shut up and the rest of them were on their best behavior as if to make up for him.

‘Zombies, when they do bite, usually just bite down like a person. The first male victim’s shoulder is torn, savaged, more like a wereanimal or a vampire.’

‘Vampires don’t tear at you like a terrier with a rat,’ Burke said. ‘They kill neat, almost clean.’ He didn’t sound happy when he said it, but he sounded sure.

I tried to remember if I’d touched anything in the morgue that I wouldn’t want touching my bare skin. I thought and just couldn’t be a hundred percent sure. ‘I’d have to take my gloves off and reglove, but after we’re all done here I can show scars where a vampire did just that to me.’

Burke’s serious cop eyes let me know he wasn’t sure he believed me.

‘I know the literature, and most of the databases treat vampires as sort of organized serial killers, methodical planners, and wereanimals as the disorganized serial killers, making a mess, choosing their victims more by chance like a wounded antelope that falls behind the herd. But I’ve known vampires that slaughtered and wereanimals that were more organized.’ I thought about it for a minute and then shook my head. ‘Okay, I’ve known more vampires that went all slaughterfest than shapeshifters that were methodical in their kills, but trust me, the antelope doesn’t always leave the herd by accident. It may look like happenstance, but most predators cause things to happen that will isolate or test the herd, so they get to see who’s weak or careless. It’s so not accidental most of the time.’

‘Predators are all the same, I guess, two legs or four,’ Burke said.

‘Human, vampire, shapeshifter, a predator is a predator,’ I agreed.

‘There’s nothing in the federal database about vampires eating their victims like a shapeshifter does,’ Rickman said. ‘I thought they couldn’t eat solid food.’

‘The commander said worry at a wound like a terrier with a rat, not eat it,’ I said.

Rickman looked blank.

‘Didn’t you ever see a dog savage something just for the hell of it, not to eat it?’ I asked.

He shrugged. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

Gonzales said, ‘Did you ever play tug-of-war with a dog that was serious about it?’

Rickman shrugged again. ‘Never had a dog.’

We all looked at him. ‘Never?’ Gonzales asked. ‘Ever?’ Al asked. ‘Are you a cat person?’ Shelley asked.

‘No, but I hear that Blake is.’ The words were innocent, but the tone was not, and neither was the look that went with it.

‘Is that some kind of clever reference to Micah Callahan being a wereleopard?’ I asked, and made sure that my voice held all the disdain I could manage, which was a lot.

‘If the furry slipper fits …’ he said.

‘Detective, I’ve been called the whore of Babylon to my face more than once; do you really think calling me a “cat person” is going to insult me?’ I made little quote marks around
cat person
.

‘Yeah, Ricky,’ Gonzales said, ‘for a ten-year veteran officer that was weak.’

‘It
was
weak,’ Al said.

‘That was a pathetic insult, Detective,’ Commander Burke said.

‘Come on, Ricky,’ I said, ‘at least call me a blood whore since I’m sleeping with vampires. Oh, wait, that’s not an original insult either; in fact, Micah’s crazy aunt and uncle already called me that today.’

‘Fine, fine, you’ve made your point.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘I haven’t begun to make my point. The vampire that tore me up the most broke my collarbone gnawing at me. The bend of my left arm has so much scar tissue that they said I’d lose the use of it, but enough weight lifting and stretching has kept me whole.’

‘So, you’re big and tough, we get it.’

‘Shut up, Ricky,’ Gonzales said.

Burke said, ‘If the vampire wasn’t trying to eat your flesh like a wereanimal, then why did he tear at you?’

‘Because he meant to hurt me, because he wanted me to suffer before he killed me. You can see what human teeth can do to bodies on these.’

‘I saw a ninety-pound cheerleader on PCP tear out a man’s throat with her teeth once,’ Burke said. He shuddered, and his professional cop look slipped a little and let the haunted look show through. Most cops had a haunted look; they hid it, but we all had it if we’d been on the job long enough. There were always things that happened that left stains on your mind, your heart, your soul. You saw the great, terrible thing and you couldn’t forget it, you couldn’t unsee it, unknow it, and you were never the same afterward. We had a moment of everyone’s eyes remembering something bad, it didn’t matter what, different memory, but same effect. We were all haunted; even Rickman’s eyes had the look.

I turned and looked at Rogers and Shelley, and the two doctors looked just as haunted. Cops; emergency medical personnel; hell, emergency personnel; firemen; ambulance drivers; all of us … you don’t need ghosts to be haunted. Memory does that just fine without any supernatural help at all.

The woman’s bite had been neater, but it had also been in her face, as if the zombie had tried to tear off her cheek. ‘I can’t tell how much damage was bite and how much was excised afterward.’

Rogers answered, ‘The patient wouldn’t sign off on the surgery to excise her wound. It was only after the patient realized that the disease was going to do more damage to her face than the surgery that she agreed to it, but it was too late. The disease had made its way to her brain and there was nothing we could do. I cut away as much of the infected tissue as I could, but when I realized that it wouldn’t save her life, I did what I could to make her comfortable. Once this thing gets into a major organ that is needed to sustain life there isn’t anything we can do, except pump them full of painkillers and make them comfortable until the end.’

I stopped looking down at the woman’s ravaged face and back up at him. ‘Is that why Sheriff Callahan is pumped up on pain meds? Has it reached a major organ system?’ My pulse sped a little, but outwardly I was calm, my best blank cop face forward.

‘No, the disease is also incredibly painful, and since we can only slow it, not stop it, we make the patients as comfortable as possible.’

‘You swear,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘I swear, Rush was lucky it was an arm wound. I was able to take a lot of the flesh. I thought I’d gotten it all, honestly, but it’s as if you can’t cut fast enough to stay ahead of it. If we hadn’t had the earlier patients to treat so we knew to put him on massive full-spectrum antibiotics and use the hyperbaric chamber, it would have spread everywhere by now, but we’re learning more with every patient.’

‘Why didn’t you excise flesh from the man’s shoulder wound?’ I asked.

‘He was the first we found alive. The emergency room doctor tried treating it as less virulent than it turned out to be. In his defense, you see the mess that the wound was. The thing really tore at him, so it was treated as a regular zombie bite, since they carry their own types of infection. By the time the attending doctor called me in it was simply too late. The infection had reached the man’s heart, and there was nothing we could do.’

‘Are you saying that his heart was rotted away?’ I asked.

Dr Shelley answered that question. ‘Yes, it was quite decayed. I’d never seen anything like it. You can see that the flesh on most of the chest is clean and looks healthy, but when I did the autopsy the heart looked more like the area around the initial wound.’

‘Why did his heart rot? Why her brain? Why didn’t it eat the outer healthy flesh first?’ I asked.

‘We aren’t a hundred percent certain,’ Rogers said, ‘but we think that this infection enters the bloodstream through the bite and rides the blood into a major organ system and rots from both ends, so to speak.’

‘So, bad luck about the face bite hitting the brain,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘And if you’d known to excise the shoulder wound on the man, then he might have been able to hold on,’ I said.

‘If he’d been a later victim instead of one of the first, I believe his odds would have been as good as the sheriff’s,’ Rogers said.

I didn’t like the way he said it, not that Rush would make it, but better odds, but we all knew that unless a miracle cure showed up, it was just a matter of time for Micah’s dad. He and I had gotten on the plane knowing that, but still … I shook it off and concentrated on work, clues, we needed fucking clues. If we couldn’t save Micah’s dad, then maybe we could find who raised the aberrant zombies and kill them. Revenge wasn’t a substitute for saving his dad, not even close, but sometimes it’s the best you can do, and it beats the hell out of nothing, or that’s what I was going to keep telling myself until I couldn’t believe it anymore.

‘Where are the earlier victims, the ones who died even faster than shoulder-wound here?’

Rogers and Shelley exchanged a look; it wasn’t a look you see often between doctors, especially when one of them is a trauma surgeon and the other is a coroner. They didn’t want to see the bodies again. Something about them bothered both doctors. What the hell?

‘We’ll have to go into the other area,’ Shelley said.

‘Other area?’ I made it a question.

‘Where we keep the bodies that are so decayed that we, well, we wouldn’t want the smell to contaminate everything. No one would be able to work down here.’

‘You mean the room for floaters and bodies like that,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ she said, and she gave me a curious look, as if she hadn’t expected me to know that.

‘These don’t smell that bad; in fact, shouldn’t the infection make them smell worse?’

‘That is one of the odd things about it; it doesn’t seem to have the odor to match the putrefaction process. It’s a small blessing for the patients and their families, but it is odd.’