Laurell Hamilton - Affliction

From the build and size of the body it was male. The clothes were disarranged as if someone had redressed him after he was dead, or because they’d only moved the clothes enough to get to his flesh. Either way, zombies didn’t do that. Ghouls didn’t do that. Wereanimals could do it, but why? They could just eat the evidence. Vampires could redress a corpse, but again, why? Also, hunks of flesh had been bitten off of the body. Vampires didn’t eat flesh; they couldn’t digest it. People could have done it, but even when you had humans who bit flesh off bodies, it would be a few bites. I counted at least ten bite marks. I couldn’t be certain, but it looked like at least two distinct bite marks, so two different monsters. Was it the two that had attacked the people in the morgue? The worst was the face; it wasn’t there anymore. I’d need to look closer to be sure, but it looked like they’d bitten off everything that made a face a face. Disfiguring didn’t begin to cover what they’d done to him. The techs would be here with floodlights soon, so I’d been told. We’d have enough light that we wouldn’t be able to unsee anything.

I’d made Nicky take Nathaniel to sit where he couldn’t see it, though I wasn’t willing for him to be far enough away from me for the smell not to reach him. For all I knew it told him more things than my eyes told me. I’d compare notes later when he could talk again. Right now, I just didn’t want my boyfriend to see the really bad stuff I had to see on the job. Nicky had agreed only if Ares stayed beside me. I didn’t argue. Ares was a combat veteran; either he’d seen as bad, or worse, or he’d take it and not bitch. Make all the jokes you want about the Marines, but they won’t pussy out. I like that in a person.

He stood at my left, because Deputy Al was to my right. Ares and he were the same height, but where Al looked like he’d been stretched too thin for his body, Ares wore it well. He was thin-framed, too, but he’d put on enough muscle so that he just looked tall, lithe, and strong. His brown eyes had gone empty. I would have said he was wearing his cop face, but he’d never been a cop. Was there a Marine face?

A lot of the police and rangers had taken any job that would keep them at the periphery of the crime scene and farther from the body. There’d damn near been a stampede to go back and tell their respective branches and see if there were other duties that needed them. I didn’t blame them, but I kept track of who couldn’t take it, a little mental list of tough enough, or not.

‘Oh, my God,’ one of the younger police officers said in a breathy voice.

I glanced at him. Al put his flashlight on his face. ‘You okay, Bush?’

I said, ‘Go over there,’ and pointed.

He looked at me, his eyes bulging a little, throat convulsing. I grabbed him and turned him the other way. ‘Don’t you fucking throw up on my crime scene! Go!’

He stumbled toward the dark edge of the trees but started throwing up before he made it.

‘How did you know?’ Al asked.

‘I see a lot of bad stuff,’ I said.

Someone else started throwing up on the other side of the clearing. Crap. The sharp smell of vomit joined with the smell of drying blood. The body had been fresh enough that it hadn’t really smelled that bad. We had two more officers throw up in the woods.

I heard Al swallow convulsively.

‘You okay?’ I asked.

He nodded, but I watched him struggle. There was something about other people throwing up that can bring it on. Once I’d have been puking my guts up, too, but that had been years ago. I didn’t throw up at crime scenes anymore.

Horton came up on the other side of Al. ‘ Your crime scene?’ he said.

‘You’ve got preternatural shit killing people and I’m from the preternatural crimes branch.’

‘We didn’t invite the Feds in,’ Horton said.

‘No,’ I said, ‘you didn’t.’ I was suddenly tired.

‘I think it’s our crime scene until we say otherwise.’

‘Fine, knock yourself out.’

He frowned at me. ‘You know, you are not the hardass that some of the other staties said.’

‘I’d rather get back to Micah and see how his dad is doing than stand here and have a pissing contest over the body.’

‘Yeah, sorry again about Sheriff Callahan.’

‘Me, too,’ I said.

Travers yelled at me across the clearing. ‘You’re supposed to be some hotshot expert. What killed Crawford, and where the fuck is Little Henry?’

I looked at the big man where he stood in the near dark, hands in fists at his side. He was trying to be enraged, but there was a flinching around his eyes that said the anger might be hiding other emotions. I remembered him saying that he and the son were friends. He had to be looking at the mess on the ground and thinking about that being done to his friend.

I said softly to Al and Horton, ‘Could this be your missing hiker?’

‘He wasn’t this tall,’ Al said.

‘Okay, how do we know which Crawford this is?’

‘Little Henry has shoulder-length hair. His dad is almost bald.’

We all looked down at the corpse. Even through the blood it was obvious that the head was almost bald. ‘Okay, this is Henry senior then.’

‘Looks that way,’ Horton said.

‘Why did they eat his face?’ Al asked, and it was the kind of question that senior police officers don’t ask, because it’s a rookie question; there is no why to the atrocities that the bad guys do. There may be motive, pathology, but it’s not really a why , because the only real answer is always the same. Why did the bad guy do the really bad thing to this victim? Because he, they, it, could. That’s the real and only true answer; all the rest is just lawyer and profiler talk.

‘One of the corpses in the morgue had its face attacked,’ I said.

‘That was one bite. This is … this is not just one bite.’ Al had asked a question that most cops stop asking by his age, but the understatement, that was all cop.

‘No, it’s not,’ I said.

‘I haven’t seen all the bodies in the morgue,’ Horton said.

I saw Travers moving this way out of the corner of my eye. Ares moved a little ahead of me, so the taller man would have to come through him. ‘No, Ares,’ I said.

He glanced at me, eyebrows raised. ‘He’s five inches taller than me and outweighs me by at least fifty pounds.’

‘Yeah, and twenty of that fifty isn’t muscle,’ I said.

‘But thirty of it is,’ he said.

‘Doesn’t matter, you only get to protect me from bad guys, not other cops.’

He looked like he wanted to argue, but he stepped to one side and let me meet Travers on my own. ‘Come on, hotshot, dazzle us.’ He was half-shouting, but his voice was thick with unshed tears. He hadn’t even let his eyes shine with them yet, but I could hear them in his voice. He was fighting so hard not to cry, and anger could help you do that. It had been my coping method of choice for years.

‘He wasn’t killed here,’ I said, voice calm.

‘Yeah, there’s not enough blood. This is their dump site. Tell me something I don’t know.’

‘Is Little Henry as big as his dad?’

‘Yeah, it’s one of the reasons we were friends, because we were both big guys. We were either going to hate each other or be friends. We were friends.’

‘Al said that they called out, said they’d found something, and then nothing.’

‘Yeah, I was there; why are you telling me shit I already know!’ He yelled it at me. I just let the rage wash over me. This was the father of his good friend, who was still missing. I’d cut him slack.

‘Did you hear fighting, shouts, cry for help?’

He shook his head. ‘No, nothing.’