Suzanne Johnson - Elysian Fields

“The ax was propped against the table here.” Ken squatted next to Jake and pointed at a small cherry end table with delicate legs. “The bedroom where the body was found is down that hall. This ax was the same as the others.”

“Any fingerprints?” Jake asked.

“Plenty—but nothing that matches anything in our databases. He’s not being careful about what he touches. He’s taunting us.”

I didn’t like the sound of that. It could be a sloppy or arrogant human killer with no police record . . . or a prete who knew nothing about forensics.

They stood up, and Ken pointed to spots where little cardboard placards had been placed by the crime lab team. “Look in those areas and see if you can find anything we missed.”

“Good idea.” Jake’s eyes lingered on the pool of blood before he turned away and began canvassing the room.

Had Jake’s voice sounded a little shaky, or was I was looking for trouble? My former cosentinel Alex Warin, an enforcer for the wizards and Jake’s new boss on the DDT, thought this lowstress assignment would be a good test for his cousin. Alex was supposed to be on this field trip instead of me, gauging Jake’s reaction to a bloody scene.

When Alex had been called away to investigate a merman- weregator problem in one of the river parishes, I got drafted— thus the late-night Axeman research.

I was partly here to see if the murder had any prete connection, and also to see how Jake handled himself.

There hadn’t been anything to indicate preternatural involvement, but any copycat crime pushed my paranoid button these days. Since the borders between modern New Orleans and the Beyond had dropped last month, any old prete could wander into town without the fear of being escorted out of the modern world by the New Orleans sentinel—namely, me.

That included the historical undead, famous former citizens given immortality in the Beyond by the magic of human memory. I wanted to make sure Axeman Deux wasn’t the real Axeman, come back in undead form to resume his murderous ways.

I had more than a passing acquaintance with all the trouble that could be caused by a member of the historical undead. The undead pirate Jean Lafitte had initially come to my house to shoot me. I’d visited his hotel room on business, only to find him interested in pleasure. We’d shared boat rides, he’d tried to impale me with a dagger, I’d accidentally set him on fire with the ancient elven staff I call Charlie, and we’d ventured back to 1850 to have a dinner date at Antoine’s before getting assaulted by an elf.

Yeah, it’s a complicated relationship.

While Ken and Jake looked at spots where the police had found minute bits of evidence—hair and fibers that could have come from either the victim or the killer—I pretended to study an antique vase and reached out with my senses.

I usually wore my mojo bag, a pouch of magic- infused herbs and gemstones that blunts my empathic abilities, but I’d left it offtonight. Whatever was here, I needed to pick up on it, whether it was residual energy from the Beyond or the fact that the blood scent made Jake’s mouth water. Can I hear an ick ?

I ignored the wonky energy of loup-garou and filtered out the other sensory details: the quiet voices of the men as they talked about the crime, the drip of water off the leaves of the banana tree outside the doors, the iron- rich scent of blood, the muddy odor of wet concrete. There was nothing else here except human energy.

That could be attributed to Ken, but it also didn’t rule out the historical undead, whose energy read mostly human. By spending time around Jean Lafitte, I’d learned the slight variation between the auras of regular humans and that exuded by the famous immortals.

At least my time with the pirate hadn’t been for nothing.

“Okay if I go back to the bedroom?” I approached the guys, who were enthusiastically discussing carpet fibers.

“Sure,” Ken said. “Just don’t—”

I threw up my hands. “I know, don’t touch anything.”

He smiled at that, and it took a decade off his face. “Alex has said that to you a few times, I bet.”

Laughing, I walked down the hallway, avoiding the blood droplets on the polished wooden floors. I’d met Ken shortly after Katrina, when Alex and I had just become cosentinels and were posing as a couple. I’m not sure he’d ever learned our true relationship. Not that I could even define it these days. Friends on the way to being . . . something . . . maybe . . . or not.

Yeah, that relationship was complicated too.

I didn’t need to follow the bloody path to find the room where the murder had occurred; the stench of death led me to the second door on the right. The overhead lights had been left on, and thank God my stomach was empty so I was spared the humiliation of barfing at Ken’s crime scene.

A duvet covered in intricate gold and brown embroidery lay in a heap at the foot of the bed, exposing a bare mattress. The sheets and pillows were missing—probably covered in blood and brain matter and taken by the cops. The top third of the mattress was soaked a deep crimson, and the spatter of red on the wall resembled some horrible Rorschach test.

I went through my ritual again, filtering out extraneous sensory data, focusing on the room. Death, especially violent death, leaves behind a signature, but it was fading.

The human aura was stronger. The place had been covered with cops. But underneath it all, like the high-pitched whine of a mosquito that’s flown too close to one’s ear, the not-quitehuman energy of a member of the historical undead swept across my skin.

Damn it. This wasn’t going to be Ken Hachette’s case. It was going to be mine.

We left the crime scene a few minutes before eight a.m., led out by a grumbling Ken. I was hungry, sore, and edgy.

“We’re gonna stop and get breakfast—want to come?” Jake asked Ken. “My treat. A thank-you for staying up all night.”

The detective unlocked his sedan, which in daylight was a coplike shade of beige. I’d bet the interior was very, very neat. “No, thanks. I gotta sleep a few hours and then hit it again. You never know when this nutcase will be back. I need to figure this thing out. Somehow.”

He didn’t sound hopeful that the figuring out was imminent. If the killer turned out to be the real Axeman, neither was I.

The Quarter remained misty as Jake and I walked toward Bourbon Street and the Green Gator, but the streets had already begun to stir. Shop owners hosed down the sidewalks in front of their businesses, the smell of strong, bitter chicory coffee drifted out of café doors, and delivery trucks blocked the narrow streets while their drivers hauled in another day’s worth of French bread and beer. The cars trapped behind them erupted into periodic bursts of horn-blowing. It all felt comforting and normal after the past few hours.

We stopped at the Old Coffeepot and got takeout orders of pain perdu for me and steak and eggs for Jake, then strolled on to the Gator. The bar was closed, so we’d be able to talk about the Axeman crimes without worrying about anyone overhearing words such as undead and preternatural .

My injured ribs ached, and by the time we got to the Gator, I was hobbling like an arthritic grandmother. Make that an arthritic grandmother with sartorial issues; in the damp weather my hair had puffed up until I felt a blond-woolly-mammoth hair day coming on. Not a look I ever achieved intentionally.

Like most French Quarter bars, the Gator only closed a few hours a day, between four and ten a.m. We had about ninety minutes before Leyla and the early shift workers arrived to start prepping bar food and putting bowls of peanuts on the tables. Gloom had settled in the corners of the long, rectangular room, even with the overhead lights turned on.