“What’s that grin about,” came a mutter from behind all that computer equipment.
“I’m just in a good mood.” Butch swirled the Lag in his glass. “You know, I’m sure you had one once. It probably scared you, though.”
“Nah, I gave it up for Lent.”
“You’re not Catholic.”
“You infected me.” V leaned back and looked around the monitors.
“Gave me a case of mono-Pope-leosis.”
“That joke is blasphemous, but worse, it’s not that funny.”
“Well, at least I can guess why you’re full of the joys of spring, tra-la. Marissa still recovering in your bed?”
“Wait, wait, I can’t talk right now.” Butch took his heavy gold Jesus piece out of his silk shirt and squeezed his eyes shut. “I’m praying for your eternal soul.”
“Don’t bother.”
“Come on, don’t you want to go to Heaven?”
“I wouldn’t know anyone up there. And don’t get too prissy with that religious bullshit, true? I don’t want to spend eternity without you, so you need to come to Dhunhd with me.”
“Will they have Milk Duds there?”
“Yes, but they’ll all be melted together. And we’ll be surrounded by Yankees fans, televangelists, and no booze.”
“We’ll think of some way to pass the time.”
“We always do.”
Butch took another long draw off the rim of his glass and let his happy glow bloom all over his shit. And yes indeedy, doody, his beautiful shellan was in fact sleeping off a marathon session that had taken them through Last Meal and left Marissa too satisfied to need food. And didn’t that make him feel like he’d been a good husband. Or hellren, to use the vampire word.
Grabbing the remote, he angled the whacker over the foosball table and turned on the flat-screen. No reason to change the channel. ESPN was on so much, it was like it had punched out all the other networks in a bar fight.
V cleared his throat from behind the monitors. “So I made a mistake.”
Cue the sound of tires screeching.
Butch tilted forward so he could see the guy. “What did you say?”
“You heard me.”
“Throwing around the m-word, huh. It must be serious. What happened? Did you try to solve pi to twelve thousand digits and get number eleven thousand nine hundred ninety-nine wrong?”
Those diamond eyes shot over. “I’m being real.”
Butch dropped the bullshit. “Talk to me.”
V typed some things on his keyboard, that diamond stare of his going back and forth as if he were reading something on one of the screens. And as silence grew between them, Butch was content to wait the guy out. The brother was not a big talker to begin with unless he was exercising his constitutional right to be sarcastic. And then he could be downright chatty. But when it came to anything remotely emotional? It was hard for him.
“I ruined that scene down in the club’s storage room,” V muttered. “Didn’t I.”
Butch blinked. “You took all those pictures first.”
“But I wasn’t careful after that.” Before Butch could respond, V continued, “I was so focused on getting the body out of there and over to Havers’s before dawn came that I just wrecked the goddamn place. It wasn’t until you went there tonight that I realized what I’d done . . . tromping all over the floor, shoving things out of the way, calling in Zypher and Balthazar with their size fourteens.”
“It was an evolving situation. A lot of things were happening.”
“No excuse.” Those eyes looked over. “I made things harder on you with the investigation. I might even have fucked you for finding out who did it. It was inexcusable.”
Thinking back to that storage room, Butch couldn’t deny that there had been substantial displacement of the scene due to the body being removed. But as much as he would have liked to do a proper quarantine and search, they had never discussed what the protocol for responding to a murder would be. Further, there were extenuating circumstances.
“Here’s the thing,” he said, “there are priorities for us that didn’t exist when I was on the human side of things. Getting that body out of there was the prime directive. Could you have disturbed things less? I don’t know. Most of the club had emptied out, from what you told me, but there were still humans on-site. It was not a secure retrieval of the remains by a long shot. You did what you had to. I can deal with the rest.”
“Next time, if there is one, I call you in first. Everybody calls you in first.”
“Good deal.” Butch frowned as he thought about the case. “You know, I got a bad feeling about it all.”
“Why?”
He threw back what was left in his glass and gave the ice a ride, circling, circling, circling. “I don’t know, maybe I’m just out of shape with this kind of work.”
“I spilled my beans. You spill yours.”
Butch smiled a little, thinking that was fair enough. “Well, I do think the killer is one of us. Female vampires are strong. It would take one hell of a human to overpower one.”
“Wait, I thought you said that the female who’d found the body already told you the victim was with a vampire that night.”
“I’m trying not to jump to any conclusions.”
“Smart. Okay, so what if the victim was drugged? A human man could get uphill of that.”
“It’s a possibility. Havers will run a toxicology on her tissue when we get the autopsy done. But even still, that meat hook? It requires a lot of strength to impale that through the base of someone’s skull.”
“Maybe they had help. What if there were two killers?”
“That’s a possibility.” Butch shrugged. “There wasn’t a lot of struggle, I can tell you that. My victim didn’t fight her attacker. So she knew her killer—or was compromised. I looked at her nails and her hands, nothing much there. And there were no defensive wounds on the outsides of her forearms or her knuckles.”
“What if she wanted him and then the sex got out of hand.”
“Could have defo happened that way.”
“You think we’ve got a serial killer?” V murmured as he typed some more and looked at his screen.
“Three victims dead in the same place within the last year and a half. I’d say that raises a red flag. Do you remember what happened with our first or second victims?”
“I know about the second one. We got a call in the following night and I went down there. The body had already been removed by someone, the scene was cold, the phone call to the service made from a burner we couldn’t trace. There was no body, no name on the caller, and no one reported a missing person thereafter.”
“Cold trail.”
“I even wondered if it was a hoax. Now I’m thinking it wasn’t.”
“What about victim number one?”
“It was a human. Found the article in the CCJ about an hour ago. I’ll send the coverage to you when I’m finished here.”
Butch stared at the coffee table without seeing the laptop, the SI magazine, the bag of Doritos he’d brought in along with the scotch from the galley kitchen. If there had been three bodies down there, then yes, they were probably dealing with a serial killer, but again, he was mindful of the lecture he’d given Boone. No jumping to conclusions. Keep everything on the table at this early stage.
“Just because one human woman and two of our females died at that club,” he said out loud, “doesn’t mean they were killed by the same person. Could be or could not. What I need is information on those other two deaths—”
“Got it.”
Butch leaned forward to pour himself more Lag. “Got what?”
“The recording that came in about the death that happened eight months ago.”
Butch paused in mid-refill. “Wait, you found that call in?”
Without taking his stare off his monitor, V cocked the eyebrow by the tattoos at his temple. “Gimme a sec to finish buffering things.”
Butch whistled under his breath. “You are a genius.”
“I know.”
A moment later, Butch’s phone vibrated on the coffee table. Putting the bottle down, he snagged the cell and looked at the notification on the screen.
An email from Vishous with an audio attachment.
“You are totally forgiven for disrupting my scene,” Butch murmured to his roommate.
V lit a fresh hand-rolled, that huge body leaning back in his padded leather chair. “If there’s a next time, it will be handled differently. You have my word.”
“I hope there won’t be, but I have a feeling we are not going to be that lucky.” Butch fired up the voicemail on the speaker, entering numerical codes to get access and waiting through a preamble. “I don’t know how you waded through those hundreds of recordings.”
“Next up, I do more digging on that first human victim. The killer could have started with them and shifted over to us.”
Butch opened his mouth to say something further, but a female’s voice came out of his phone: I—I want to report a death. A murder . . . a killing. At Pyre’s Revyval downtown. It happened the night before last. A female. She—she was found on the lower level by friends. She was taken . . . out of the club by them . . . she was dead . . .
“Sonofabitch,” Butch muttered.
“What?” V said.
“It’s the same female. It’s the same one who reported the death last night.”
The following evening, Boone left the house at nine p.m. He had a good seven hours before his father’s Fade Ceremony, and there was one and only one place he was going to go. Dematerializing downtown, he re-formed by the parking spot where he and Butch had left the R8 the night before. With a limping stride, his shitkickers ate up the distance toward the front door of Pyre’s Revyval, the steel-reinforced treads of his boots punching a pattern in the fresh snow that had fallen during the day.