Лорел Гамильтон - Dead Ice

“No.”

“Enlighten us,” she said, and there was something in the way she said it that I didn’t like. It was just an undercurrent, but if I had to bet, I think something I’d said, or done, while we watched the films had made her suspicious of me. I wondered, if it hadn’t been a male voice ordering the zombie around, would they have looked at me as a suspect from the beginning? I hoped not, but a lot of people still saw my psychic ability as evil. Hell, the Catholic Church had excommunicated us all unless we gave up raising the dead, because only Jesus was allowed to do that. Biblical scholars had pointed out that four of his disciples had done it, too, but the Pope, at the time, had found comparing zombie-raising pagans to the disciples of Jesus Christ less than amusing.

“Her soul, her personality, whatever you want to call it, seems to be in the body, except you can’t raise a zombie from the grave if the soul is still in residence,” I said.

“So how do you explain it?” she asked.

“She was just a walking corpse in the first film. Her eyes were empty, she was an it, but between that and the first sex tape, that changed.”

“How?” Manning asked.

“You’ve got witches and psychics on the payroll at the FBI now. You even have at least one animator. What’d they come up with?”

“Nothing,” she said.

Brent added, “They all saw what you see, that she was in there somehow, but no one had a clue how it was accomplished.”

“Do you know how it was done?” Manning asked.

I nodded. “I’ve seen it done once.”

“Give us a name and we may have our guy,” Brent said, all eager for a clue.

“It was a woman, and she’s dead.” I added, “I believe she’s dead.”

“Give us a name, we’re good at finding people,” Manning said.

“Dominga Salvador; she was the most powerful vaudun priestess in the Midwest.”

“She went missing just after she challenged you.”

I raised eyebrows at Manning. “Challenged me? You mean sent killer zombies into my apartment to kill me? If that’s your definition of challenge , then okay.”

“Some of the local law enforcement officers thought you’d killed her in self-defense.”

“The local LEOs didn’t trust me as much before I had a badge.”

“I trusted you,” Zerbrowski said.

I smiled at him. “You liked me; I don’t know if you trusted me.”

He grinned and seemed to think about it. “I can’t remember for sure, but I know that long before you got your own badge you proved anything you needed to prove to me.”

“Aw shucks, Zerbrowski, you’re going to make a girl blush.”

He grinned wider and offered me his fist. I bumped it gently.

“Nice distraction there, Sergeant,” Manning said.

“I don’t know what you mean, Agent,” he said.

Her lips curled down in a face that said, clearly, she knew that he knew exactly what he’d done. “It’s going to take more than that to distract me.”

“And that’s the truth,” Brent said. His partner gave him an unfriendly look and he held his hands out empty, as if to say he didn’t mean any harm.

“Why do you think Dominga Salvador is dead?” Manning asked.

“Because I’m alive, and once a person like the Señora wants you dead she doesn’t give up.”

“How do you think she died?”

I tried to appear nonchalant and was glad that I did better blank cop face than I had years ago when I’d known Dominga Salvador, because I was about to tell a very big lie to the FBI. “I have no idea.” I could feel my pulse speed in my throat; if I’d been on a polygraph I’d have failed.

Manning studied my face like she’d memorize the number of eyelashes I had. I stayed blank and slightly smiling, and felt my eyes dead and empty as last year’s New Year’s resolutions. I wanted to look away from her so badly it almost hurt, but I didn’t. I knew exactly how Dominga Salvador had died, because I had killed her.

I DIDN’T FEEL bad about the death, because she’d been trying to force me to murder someone else as a human sacrifice at the time, but it was still technically murder. She’d also been the first person I ever killed with zombies that I’d raised from the grave, which was still an automatic death sentence. It fell under the magical malfeasance laws; any practitioner of psychic or supernatural gifts who used such as a method of murder, or violence outside self-defense parameters, was subject to the strictest enforcement of the laws therein. Strictest enforcement was execution, which is pretty damned strict.

It helped me meet Manning’s eyes and control everything but my pulse. I even got a handle on that by thinking about quieting my breathing for shooting accuracy. Calm your breathing, and your heartbeat has to follow, eventually, and with that, your pulse will slow, eventually.

“My grandmother would have said butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth, Marshal.”

“I’ve never understood that saying; I mean, I know it implies you think I’m lying, but why would butter not melt in someone’s mouth, and what has that got to do with being truthful?”

Manning frowned at me.

“I think it implies you’re cold-blooded, or something,” Brent said.

We all looked at him.

He had the grace to look embarrassed. “Blake asked, and my gran used to say it, too.”

“Just stop talking,” Manning said.

He made the little push-away gesture again. “I’m done talking, except we’re here to get Blake’s help, and accusing her of murder probably isn’t the way to get her to share information with us.”

“Why are you still talking?”

“Because I’m your partner, and I would do damn near anything to catch these bastards. I thought you felt the same.”

Manning looked away first. “Would you really let a murder go?”

“I read up on Dominga Salvador, and she had the idea to turn zombies into sex slaves first. She just didn’t live long enough to do it.”

“We only have Blake’s word for the Señora’s plans,” Manning said.

“Are you really accusing Marshal Blake of murder after coming to us for help?” Zerbrowski asked, and there was no joking in his tone now.

Manning rubbed her temples and shook her head. “I don’t know, yes, no, not really. Do I think that Blake killed her? Probably, but if someone sent a pack of killer zombies into my home to attack me . . . we’re allowed to defend ourselves from the monsters.”

She looked at me and her eyes weren’t just tired; they were haunted. “You haven’t seen all the videos. They raise two other women and they let them rot more than this before they put their souls back into their bodies. There’s a video of the moment that the second woman sees herself in the mirror. Half her face is rotted away, but she can still scream.” She covered her own face with her hands and made a sound that was half exasperated sound, half muffled words.

“Sorry, Agent Manning, didn’t quite catch that,” Zerbrowski said.

She lowered her hands and looked at him. “I said I’ve heard a lot of bad screams. An amazing number of these . . . evil bastards make video or audio of their victims. I thought I’d heard the worst screams, but that one was one of the worst things I’ve ever heard.” She turned to me. “If I thought you had done this I’d put the needle in you myself, but I’m just groping in the dark, Blake.”

“What do you want from me, Manning?”

“The report you gave when you helped get a warrant to search Salvador’s house talked about human sacrifice and mentioned her scheme to use zombies as sex slaves, but I feel like you left out things, because if you overexplain the magic theory too much most judges won’t sign off on things. What did you leave out? How are they doing this? One of the last zombies seems to rot, then stop, and then rot worse; why?”