Raw Deal (Bite Back) (2 page)

He had a point. Nobody wanted me to examine the body before CSI got here. I’d have to get back to it later. Meanwhile, I was the rookie in Car 152, and for all his faults, I had to respect that Knight took his mentoring seriously. If only he could manage to remember that I’d handled more life-or-death situations than a dozen police officers combined.

Or maybe he did remember. Maybe that was the problem.

I taped off the alley at both ends and got two crime scene forms from the patrol car—one for the dead body and one for the racers’ car. I took up my post and waited for the crime scene crows to gather.

I’d lived around death for ten years in the army’s most covert and lethal special operations battalion. A body was a body, and I had seen plenty. The problem was, this might not be just another body. If this turned out to be a vampire kill, then I had a responsibility to report it—and not to the Denver PD.

Another couple of patrols arrived to help secure the site, leaving me the south end of the alley, next to my patrol car.

“You okay?” Knight said, ducking under the tape to come join me.

I turned. “I’m fine. Thanks.”

He scuffed his feet, folded his arms and leaned back against the hood of the Crown Vic.

I knew it was coming and I wasn’t patient enough to wait for it.

“Something on your mind?” I said.

He snorted without any humor at all.

“You have to ask?” he said. “You went barreling down that alley without even stopping to think. Those guys could’ve been armed.” He paused for obvious effect. “Oh, wait, they
were
armed.” He rolled his eyes. “You can thank God they decided to shoot at the veteran cop who had sense enough to find cover, and not at you, bounding over cars and dumpsters like Spidergirl.”

I opened my mouth to answer, but he held up his hand and went on. “It’s only by blind dumb luck we don’t have two stiffs in this alley. Do you know how much paperwork I’d have to do if you got yourself killed?”

Underneath the scathing tone, I could sense real concern. I stopped myself just in time, before I blasted him with a Sergeant Farrell tirade. Instead, I took a deep breath, and then explained my line of reasoning for following the suspects down the alley.

 Knight pursed his lips, studying me. “And you were totally confident in your ability to take down both guys?”

I’d served in an unconventional unit, and my training had been unconventional to match, not to mention brutal and thorough. I had no doubts about my ability, but Knight didn’t know the full extent of my training, and confidentiality rules meant I couldn’t tell him the details.

“I was going to leave you one,” I said, trying to make light of it. “Then he started shooting at Wilcox. But, hey, we got both of them, in the alley, with the car and the gun.”

“They weren’t going to get away, for Christ’s sake,” he said, waving at the alley. “And there’s a good reason we work in pairs. It’s safer. It’s not just your ass on the line, there are situations where it’s safer for both of us if we go in together.”

I didn’t agree with his comment about them not getting away—the shooter would have been over the fence if I’d been much slower. There
were
situations where it would have been safer and more efficient to work as a pair, but this wasn’t one of them. I’d trained in tougher schools than he had and threat assessment was wired into me.

I knew that, but I also knew better than to say it out loud. It would sound like lack of respect for
his
skills and judgment.

“Well, Wilcox thought it was okay. I saw him congratulating you.”

I saw you taking the praise. For both of us.

“Y’know what Wilcox was saying to me?” Knight looked down at his boots and I realized not all his anger was directed at me. “He said we were showboating, shaping up to be a pair of real cowboys. Said it was obviously catching.”

Crap.
I had completely misread what was going on. Knight wasn’t being an ass because I’d shown him up.

“You could have set him straight on who did the showboating,” I said.

“I’m not the rookie with ambitions,” he said. “Wilcox trying to label me a cowboy isn’t going to wash with the sergeant. But if it sticks on you, it might end up in your review.”

He didn’t need to go on. A cowboy was a maverick police officer, someone destined to be shuffled off into a backroom job because no one trusted them. It wasn’t a fair assessment, but if it stuck, getting rid of it was something else. Meanwhile, Knight was trying to divert some of the crap from me, not sucking up praise as I’d thought.

“So, maybe Wilcox is full of it,” he went on. “Maybe you know what you’re doing better than you get credit for, but, y’know, we’re not working well together at the moment.”

That
wasn’t good. Unfortunately, I didn’t get time to discuss it before we were interrupted by the first arrival.

A car pulled up and a man got out and headed into the alley. Medium height, heavy blond hair with a curl that needed flicking to keep it off his forehead. Sharp jaw. Worked out too much, with too much emphasis on the shoulders and arms. Kinda heavy on his feet. Known to me.

I raised a hand to stop him anyway and got the badge wave in return. He didn’t even look at me as he signed the form and walked on. Detective Buchanan was too important to look at uniforms.

Right after him, a couple from CSI turned up and signed in too. The intense blond woman I’d seen before, but her lanky, male partner was new to me.

I got to hand over the crime scene form to one of the other uniforms while CSI took Knight and me inside the tape to do a walk through. My boot mark in the middle of the car’s hood got a twitch of eyebrows and I could see the woman mentally measuring the distance to where I’d taken the first racer down. We moved on to the fence, and I glossed over how far ahead of the others I’d got. Knight didn’t dispute it. Hopefully, the CSI document on the sequence of events would make us look less like cowboys, and Knight and me more like partners.

At the first dumpster, I gave them the photo I’d taken before opening the hoodie, then we finally moved to the body in the second dumpster. I handed over my latex gloves, which I’d turned inside out, and explained clearing the trash and the pulse check I’d done on the body.

They didn’t let me get anywhere near it, and the garbage smell was still killing anything else, so I ended up back outside the tape, still unsure of what had killed the man, but a little happier about Knight.

When the sergeant had first handed out the schedule and I saw I was assigned to partner Knight, about the only thing I’d known about him was that his nickname was ‘Silent.’ As in huge joke. As in ceaseless patter while I drove.

But he was a decent guy. He didn’t smell and he hadn’t hit on me. At least, not yet. It’s not that I expect it. At five-ten, I’m too tall for a lot of guys. I run a lot, I practice martial arts and I spent years in the army. I don’t do simpering. Most guys don’t look beyond that, at the auburn hair and green eyes, a product of mixed Celtic and Arapaho blood. I was nothing to write home about, but I’d heard that long hours sharing a cruiser made anyone attractive.

Anyone? I glanced back at Knight and hid a smile.

No. Not gonna work for me.

It wasn’t that I needed him specifically as a partner, but I needed a partner, and I needed one who would vouch for me. There were no official forms for that kind of evaluation. But one evening at the bar, someone would ask Knight how the rookie was shaping up, and it was amazing how much a career depended on the answer to that question.

I’d expected hazing and grunt work while I was a rookie, and I could deal with both. But I’d thought all my Ops experience would be an asset. If it turned out to be a liability, I was so screwed.

There was much more at stake for me here than just a job with the police. After the ‘incident,’ as the army referred to it, they had discharged me and gotten me this job, but they had a price. I was still reporting to them. If I stayed sane, employed, and didn’t turn into anything that went bump in the night, I got to stay in Denver. If I failed in any of those areas, they’d reach out and pull me back in.

The city started to wake up, and one of the other uniform guys spelled me so I could fetch coffees.

When I came back, miracles had happened. Buchanan was talking to uniform. Crap.

He swung around as I approached. “Good of you to join us. I hope it’s not inconvenient for us to talk during your break.”

“Of course not, Detective.” I shut myself up before I added –
glad you could make the time for us
.

Even so, Buchanan’s jaw worked.

Way to go, Farrell.

I hadn’t learned that attitude in the army and it really wouldn’t do me any favors here. He was being an asshole, but I couldn’t afford to piss him off enough that the others wouldn’t back me up. They didn’t need to create enemies in their jobs over some smartass rookie who might talk her way out of hers.

“You were first to the body?” he asked.

“Yes. The vehicle over there hit the dumpsters—”

“I’m aware of the background,” he cut me off. “You checked he was dead?”

“Yes. No pulse in the throat.”

“Did you inform CSI you contaminated their scene?”

Yet another cop who thought I was wet behind the ears. “No, Detective. But I handed them the gloves I wore and explained what I’d done.”

Buchanan’s eyes narrowed. I looked back innocently.

The Medical Examiner and CSI teams came over and Buchanan turned his back on us. A couple of the ME’s assistants wheeled the body into their van. I looked wistfully after it, but I was pretty sure that if I  tried to sneak in the van and get a sniff of the corpse, I’d be fired on the spot.

The woman from CSI seemed almost as excluded from Buchanan’s conversation as the rest of us. What was her name? Melissa something. Melissa Owen?

I edged over to her. We hadn’t been dismissed by Buchanan, but he hadn’t told us we had to stand there like dummies.

“Hi, er…Melissa.” We had been introduced before, and Owen sounded wrong.

“Amber,” she said, turning toward me, her face neutral but open.

“Strange neck wounds on that body.”

“Yes.”

“Were they the cause of death?”

“Possibly.”

“I didn’t see any blood in the trash or on the ground nearby.”

“Hmmm.”

I’d have more luck squeezing stones. I tried a different approach. “Would it be possible for me to have another look?”

“Are you being serious? Along with everything else, you have crime scene investigation experience?” Buchanan’s tone dripped sarcasm, cutting across any response that Melissa might have made.

No, I didn’t. But I had plenty of experience with dead bodies, and some experience with vampire bites. If that’s what these were, then the army was going to want to know about it. Looking out for vampires was the reason I was here and not back where the army could keep a better eye on me. The trouble was, when you spent half your time looking for things that most people thought didn’t exist, there was always the chance that you’d start seeing things that weren’t there.

A body was bled out. It had a pattern of wounds to the throat. There was no blood around. That wasn’t conclusive evidence of vampires, or anything else.

“If we’re all finished,” said Buchanan, staring at me. “First estimate puts this guy being killed between 10 and 12 last night. He wasn’t killed here in the alley or in the apartment building, so the body had to have been brought in from somewhere. I need you to do a house to house within a block to check if anyone saw something between 10 p.m. and the time you got here. Any questions?”

“There’s a HALO camera across the way,” I said. Denver’s HALO surveillance network was intended to reduce crime. If the camera was on and if it was pointed in this direction, we could have a lead.

“If there’re no questions, then I suggest you get on with your task,” Buchanan said and walked away. The other two uniforms headed up to where the alley joined 11
^th
Avenue without a word. Even the CSI and ME crew looked suspiciously at me as they left.

“Oh, nice work,
Detective
Farrell.” Knight jerked his head and we walked back past our patrol car. “I thought you wanted to try for Homicide eventually.”

“I do.” I looked to the heavens. “Don’t try and tell me that asshole is responsible for admission.”

“No.” Knight shook his head. “He’s not responsible. But he goes to ball games with the guy who is.”

I groaned. That wasn’t what I wanted to hear, on top of a graveyard shift patrol and the promise of a long extra stretch of getting told nothing by the people living nearby. We split up and started knocking on doors.

A time of death of 11 p.m., give or take. Of course, I didn’t know it then, but that was when the clock had started ticking.

Chapter 2

A couple of hours later, and with nothing to show for it, I pushed open the door to a shoe shop of some kind, the last place on my section.

There were racks of shoes and a workbench on the left, where a large man with a bushy beard was carefully packing some beautiful cowboy boots into a box. An intoxicating smell of fresh brewed coffee wafted from the back of the shop, fighting against the scent of freshly treated leather.

The man looked up at me over little, half-glass spectacles. “Welcome. Welcome,” he boomed, with a heavy German accent. “And for you, I think, these.” He put the box aside and brought up another pair of boots onto the worktop.

“Oh, God, I wish,” I said. At his nod, I picked one up and turned it over in my hands. It was the kind of quality you can’t find in the shopping mall. A handmade boot, the sole arched like a cat stretching and with a silky soft shaft.

I wanted them. My head gave my heart a major talking-to and I put the boot back down on the counter, my fingers reluctant to stop stroking it.

I sighed. “I’m afraid I’m here to ask questions, not to look at boots.” I flipped the page of my notebook and wrote the shop name at the top—Schumacher’s. The name made me grin.