It took me a moment to look directly at Tony’s corpse. When I did, I breathed out in relief. He didn’t look like he had in the hotel room. Now, with his eyes taped shut, he seemed at peace. This was his shell, not the man himself. Not any longer.
I gazed at him. He wasn’t coming back to life. I couldn’t have explained how I knew that for certain. It was simply what my gut told me.
Laura pulled the sheet further away. ‘You can see the ligature marks and bruising around his neck.’
I forced myself to look.
‘On the face of it, this is an open-and-shut case of auto-erotic asphyxiation. There’s no history of depression, and initial bloodwork shows no traces of anti-depressants in his body. Actual cause of death is almost definitely strangulation. However, there’s no evidence of either ejaculate or sexual arousal. On its own, that’s not necessarily proof of anything but, after I spoke to DSI Barnes and took a closer look, I found this.’ Laura carefully brushed back a section of hair from Tony’s neck.
I peered more closely. There was a tiny mark, barely visible.
‘I wasn’t sure at first,’ Laura admitted, ‘but when I examined it more closely with a portable microscope, it became very clear. Anthony Brown was injected with something shortly before his death. At this angle, it would have hit his bloodstream directly.’
‘Tony,’ I murmured. ‘He preferred to be called Tony.’ I stared at the little blemish. ‘Is there any chance he did it to himself?’
Laura shook her head. ‘The angle means that it was administered by someone else. When more blood test results come back, I think we’ll find evidence of a paralytic. He was rendered immobile so that his assailant could position him for strangulation and make it appear self-inflicted.’
A deep, dark, yawning chasm of emptiness opened up inside me. ‘How long will it be until you know for sure?’
Laura grimaced. ‘A few days. And it’s entirely possible that the drug has already broken down in his bloodstream and is already undetectable.’
‘So there might never be proof that he was murdered?’
‘Yes. I’m sorry.’
‘It’s not your fault,’ I said distantly, damning to hell and back the bastard who’d done this.
‘That’s not the only thing,’ Laura said, more cheerfully this time. ‘There’s something else.’
I glanced at her.
‘I found a hair. Just one hair, mind, and I’m not sure how useful it will be. After I found the injection mark, I went back to look at the tie that was used round his neck. The hair was caught in the knot. It’s too long and too light to belong to Anthony Brown. To Tony,’ she amended. ‘I’ve examined it and there’s no doubt in my mind that it’s lupine.’
I sucked in a breath. ‘Werewolf?’
‘Yep.’ Laura looked pleased with herself. She had good reason to be. ‘You won’t find a match for it on any system. We’re not permitted to keep records of supes’ DNA or fingerprints. But it definitely came from a wolf.’
‘Can you show me?’
She nodded and pointed at a microscope. The hair in question was trapped beneath its glass slide. Russet coloured, and with a definite curl. I stared at it. Gotcha.
‘I don’t need to tell you that, because Tony Brown worked in Supernatural Squad, he’ll have come into contact with supes all the time. A single werewolf hair isn’t proof of anything. It could have come from anywhere.’
I smiled. It was proof enough for me. ‘Thank you, Laura.’
‘Any time.’ Her smile vanished. ‘I should tell you that someone called last night asking about you.’
I stiffened. ‘About me?’
‘It wasn’t my shift,’ she said apologetically, ‘so I didn’t speak to them, and the caller didn’t mention you by name. The phone call was logged – I heard about it when I came in this morning. They wanted to know about your body, if it had been brought in to this morgue, that sort of thing.’
‘Police?’
‘I doubt it.’ Her voice was grim. ‘They didn’t leave a name.’
I drew in a sharp breath. I hadn’t been sure I could feel much worse after re-visiting the scene of my rebirth and seeing Tony’s body again, but I did. ‘Male?’
She nodded.
My killer. It had to be. He’d gotten wind that I was wandering around the streets and wanted to know what had gone wrong. ‘Are the phone calls recorded?’ I asked, desperation uncoiling and manifesting itself in the tremble in my voice.
Laura made a face. ‘Sorry, they’re not. It was decided by the powers that be that recording grieving families when they enquire about their loved ones was an intrusion too far.’
As much as I could understand the sentiment, it didn’t help me.
‘Maybe you should lie low for a few days,’ Laura advised. ‘We didn’t give out any information about your body, not even confirmation that you’d been brought in. We’re not allowed to without ID validation. But that doesn’t mean you’re not in danger.’
I thought about Tony’s body lying on the cold gurney. ‘I can’t do that.’
‘Somehow I knew you’d say that.’ She reached out and squeezed my hands. ‘Be bloody careful, Emma.’
Easier said than done.
Chapter Nineteen
Putting my worries about the mysterious caller to one side because there was nothing I could do about him, I walked outside with my head held high. Despite the lack of proof, I was beyond convinced that Tony had been murdered. I didn’t know why his death had been made to look like an accident while mine had been the complete opposite, and there was no apparent motive for either of our murders, but I felt like I was getting somewhere. The answers were within my grasp if I looked hard enough.
I smiled to myself – then I saw Lukas leaning against Tallulah and my smile vanished.
He raised a hand to me as I approached. ‘There’s no need to look quite so glum when you see me, D’Artagnan.’
‘Are you stalking me now?’
‘In a sense,’ he replied. ‘I came looking for you and I suspected you might be here.’
‘You mean you don’t have hospital workers on the payroll?’
‘Actually, I do.’ He offered me an easy grin. ‘But none of them work in the morgue. It wasn’t rocket science to work out that you’d be here. You told me yourself that you’d be visiting.’
I had – but I didn’t like the idea that he was going to continually show up without warning. I had enough metaphorical shadows as it was; I didn’t need real ones too.
‘Are you alright?’ he asked.
‘Fine.’ I paused. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘I thought it might be difficult for you to come back here after what happened to you.’ His expression was serious.
His show of empathy flustered me more than I wanted it to. ‘I coped,’ I said.
‘I knew you’d cope but that doesn’t make it any easier.’
For a moment I didn’t speak, then I glanced at him. ‘Thank you for asking.’
Lukas inclined his head. ‘If you ever need to talk, I’m more than willing to listen. While my experience was nothing like yours, I do know a little about rebirth.’
‘When were you turned?’ It wasn’t curiosity that made me ask but the opportunity to turn the conversation away from myself.
‘Close to fifty years ago.’ He rubbed his chin. ‘I might look like a young, sprightly specimen of masculinity, but I’m close to eighty years old.’ His gaze suddenly sharpened. ‘Does that bother you, D’Artagnan?’
‘Should it?’
He didn’t look away. ‘Different people react in different ways.’
His age didn’t make any difference to me and I couldn’t imagine why it would. I had other questions, however. I jerked my chin up to the sky. ‘It’s not long past midday. Are you sure the sun doesn’t bother you?’
‘I’m sure. I prefer the night. All vampires do, because our vitality increases as the sky darkens, but I don’t shrivel up at the sign of a sunbeam. Much as you might wish that were so.’
‘I don’t wish that.’
‘Good.’ He gazed at me, then he shook himself. ‘So did you find out anything useful in there?’
I exhaled. ‘You were right about the werewolf.’ I outlined what Laura had discovered. Lukas listened to what I had to say, and his expression darkened.
‘If news of this gets out,’ he muttered once I’d finished, ‘it could spell chaos. Whoever did this knows that, otherwise they wouldn’t have tried to conceal Brown’s death as a suicide and yours as a knife-based mugging gone wrong. It appears that Brown was killed because he was a danger and he needed to be shut up. We can assume that the same is true for you.’ He gazed at me thoughtfully. ‘So, D’Artagnan, what have you seen and what do you know that might tempt someone to kill you?’
I’d been thinking about this. ‘I was only in Supe Squad for a day, so there’s not much to sift through. There is one thing, though.’
Lukas raised his eyebrows. ‘Go on.’
‘There was a woman,’ I said. ‘A female werewolf. I saw her running down the street in the middle of the day covered in blood.’
‘Stranger things have happened where the wolves are concerned.’
‘I wouldn’t know about that, but it’s not something I see on a daily basis,’ I admitted. ‘I went after her to make sure she was okay. When I found her, by the sound of things she was one who’d been attacking rather than the other way around. She was screaming at a male werewolf about her sister who was missing. She seemed to think he had something to do with it.’
‘And?’
‘And nothing. Tony appeared with Lady Sullivan in tow and bawled me out for getting involved. And that,’ I said flatly, ‘was the last time I saw him.’