Лорел Гамильтон - Obsidian Butterfly

I nodded. "Yeah."

"The police tramped over that area within an inch of its life," Olaf said. "Are you saying you can find something that they can't?" His arrogance was showing.

"With the first murder, especially, the police were looking for a human perpetrator. If you're looking for a human being, you look for different things than if it's a monster." I smiled. "Besides, if we didn't all think we could find things that the police couldn't, we wouldn't be here. Edward wouldn't have called us in, and the police wouldn't have shared the files with him."

Olaf frowned. "I have never seen you smile like this, Edward, unless you are pretending to be Ted. You took like a proud teacher whose pupil is doing well."

"More like Frankenstein with his monster," I said.

Edward thought about it for a second, then nodded and grinned, pleased with himself. "I like that."

Olaf frowned at both of us. "You did not create her, Edward."

"No," I said, "but he helped make me the woman I am today."

Edward and I looked at each other, and the smiles faded from both our faces, leaving us solemn. "Am I supposed to apologize for that?" he asked.

I shook my head. "Do you feel like apologizing for it?"

"No," he said.

"Then don't. I'm alive, Edward, and I'm here." I stood and didn't sway at all. Life was good.

"Let's find out if any of the killings took place after daylight. When I've looked at all this shit, let's go see some murder scenes." I looked at Edward. "If that's all right with you. You are the boss."

He gave a small nod. "That's fine, but to keep Ted working with the Santa Fe PD, we'll need to include them at the murder sites."

"Yeah," I said, "police don't like civvies mucking up their murder scenes, makes them testy."

"Besides, you're already persona non grata in Albuquerque," Edward said. "We've got to keep some of the cops willing to talk to you."

"And that's really bugging me," I said. "I'm barred from the freshest crime scenes, the newest evidence. I don't need another handicap on a case like this."

"You don't know what it is either, do you?" Edward said.

I shook my head, and sighed. "Not a damn clue." Bless his chauvinistic heart, but Olaf didn't say, I told you so.

I went back to staring at the pictures, and suddenly I could see it. I let out a breath, and said, softly, "Wow." The room seemed hot. Dammit, I was not going to have to sit down again. I put my fingertips on either side of the wall steadying myself, but it must have looked like I was trying for a closer look. Trust me, I was as close as I ever wanted to get. I finally had to close my eyes for just a few seconds. When I opened them, I was okay or as okay as I was likely to be.

Body parts scattered like flower petals, stirred into a red mess. My eye flicked from one blood-covered lump to another. I was almost sure that was a forearm, and the ball of a knee joint showed whitely amid all the red. I'd never seen so many pieces before. I'd seen bodies torn apart before, but that had been for food or punishment. But there was a terrible completeness to this … destruction. I moved on to a shot of the same image but from a slightly different angle. I tried to put the body together in my head, but kept coming up short on parts.

I finally turned around. "There's no head and no hands." I pointed at small lumps in the blood. "Unless those are fingers. Was the body completely disjointed even down to the finger bones?"

Edward nodded. "Every victim has been almost completely dismembered down to the joints."

"Why?" I asked. I looked at Edward. "Where's the head?"

"They found it down the hill behind the house. The brain was missing."

"How about the heart?" I asked. "I mean there's the spine, almost intact, but I don't see any viscera. Where are all the internal organs?"

"They didn't find them," Edward said.

I leaned back, half-sitting on the table. "Why take the internal organs? Did they eat them? Is it part of some magical ritual? Or is it just part of the ritual of the killing itself, a souvenir?"

"There are a lot of organs in the body," Olaf said. "You put them all in one container and they can be heavy, bulky. They also rot very quickly unless you put them in some form of preservative."

I looked at him, but he wasn't looking at me. He was looking at the pictures. He hadn't given a lot of detail, but something in the way he said it made him sound like he knew what he was talking about.

"And how do you know how heavy the internal organs of a human body can be?"

"He could have worked in a morgue," Edward said.

I shook my head. "But he didn't, did you, Olaf."

"No," he said, and now he was looking at me. His eyes had been turned into two dark caves by the deep set of his face and a trick of light, or would that be darkness. He stared down at me, and without seeing his eyes I could feel the intensity of that stare, as if I were being studied, measured, dissected.

I kept my gaze on Olaf, but asked, "What is his specialty, Edward? Why did you call him in on this particular case?"

"The only person I've ever seen do anything close to this, is him," Edward said.

I glanced at him, and his face was calm. I turned back to Olaf. "I was told you went to jail for rape, not murder."

He looked right at me and said, "The police arrived too soon."

A cheerful voice called out from the front of the house. "Ted, it's us." It was Donna, and the «us» could only mean the kids.

Edward left at a goodly walk, trying to head her off. I think Olaf and I might have still been staring at each other when she walked in on us, but Bernardo came in, and said, "We're supposed to hide the pictures."

"How?" Olaf asked.

I took the candelabra off the table and said, "Put the table cloth over the door." I stood aside and let Bernardo drag it off the table.

Olaf said, "Aren't you going to help him? You are one of the boys, after all."

"I'm not tall enough to hold it up over the entire door," I said.

He gave a small smile, derisive, but he moved up to help Bernardo block the open doorway with the tablecloth.

I was left standing behind them with the black iron candelabra in my hands. I stared at the tall, bald man and was half-regretful that I wasn't tall enough to smash the heavy iron candelabra into his skull. Just as well. I'd owe Edward another favor if I killed one of his backups just because he'd scared me.

I COULD HEAR EDWARD in his best consoling Ted voice, trying to convince her that she didn't need to say Hi to everyone. She argued, polite, but firm, that of course she did. The more he tried to keep her away, the more she wanted to see. Call it a hunch, but I was betting it was me she wanted to see. The house was arranged so that you couldn't enter the three guest bedrooms without going through the dining room. Donna wanted to make sure where I was, and that I hadn't been in anyone's bed but my own. Or at least not in Ted's. Did she think that I was racing ahead of them to my room to throw clothes over my nakedness? Whatever the motive, she was coming this way. I heard Becca's voice.

Shit. I ducked under the rug across the door and nearly ran into them. Donna stopped walking with a small oomph of surprise. Her eyes were wide as she looked at me as if I'd scared her. Peter was watching me with cool brown eyes, as if it was all too boring for words, but underneath the perfect teenage boredom was a light, an interest. Everybody wondered why the tablecloth was in front of the doorway.

It was Becca who said it. "Why is the rug in front of the door?" I kept calling it a tablecloth because that's what Edward was using it for, but it still looked like a rug. Kids stick to the basics.

Donna looked at Edward. "Yes, Ted, why is the tablecloth in front of the door."