Sweet Last Drop (2 page)

“I don’t want to interview the coroner,” I said stubbornly. “I want to interview a witness.”

“I doubt an animal attack is what your boss had in mind when he approved your story on city versus rural New York crime fluctuations. You don’t need interviews from this case.”

I snorted. “Carter will love whatever I give him, although after my last article, an animal attack might be pushing the envelope.”

Walker raised his eyebrows. “Animal attacks in New York City certainly warrant headlines, but up here in Erin, NY, darlin’, they’re the rule, not the exception.”

“You’re telling me this is truly an animal attack from an actual animal? Not a vampire attack made to look like an animal attack?”

Walker nodded.

“How can you know for sure? How do you differentiate between what’s real from the reality that Bex fabricates?”

“Bex would never leave a kill out for discovery.” Walker’s voice was clipped and uncharacteristically formal. “She’s very careful about selecting and disposing of her prey.”

“Neither would Dominic, but with the Leveling approaching—”

“Bex’s Leveling isn’t approaching,” Walker interrupted. “Unlike Dominic, she’s unfortunately in full, indisputable command of her coven. They don’t make mistakes, not like this.” Walker gestured to the surrounding woods and the pieces of Lydia Bowser that had been left out for discovery.

I bit my tongue to stop myself from defending Dominic. He was indisputably in command of his coven too, but a faction of rebels was frustrated with his conservative rule. He knew they no longer wanted to hide their existence from humans, but he’d never suspected that Jillian Allister, his second in command, would lead the uprising. In some ways, the blow of Jillian’s betrayal had been more devastating to him than his physical injuries. We’d barely survived, but despite her betrayal, Dominic had regained control of his coven.

Considering Walker’s unilateral distain for vampires, defending Dominic would only derail our conversation, so instead I said, “I’ve no doubt that Bex has control of her coven, but mistakes happen. We shouldn’t rule anything out.”

Walker crossed his arms. “I’ll need to measure the bite radius and inspect the tracks to confirm the species and the number of potential predators, but I’ve no doubt that an animal attacked and killed Lydia, not a vampire.”

I held Walker’s gaze for a suspended moment, but despite my alligator exterior, even I melted under his velvety brown eyes. I sighed and let some of the anger seep away. “So no interviews.”

Walker nodded. “If you insist on discounting the coroner, no interviews.”

“Then why bring me here? It’s nothing I haven’t seen from your lovely tour of the town this afternoon.”

“Although it’s not homicide, it’s still a case I’ll be working on while you’re in town. I thought you’d want in.”

I smiled. “I always want in.”

Walker’s smirk widened. “So stop wasting our time arguing and get your fill before Berry arrives to transport Lydia to the morgue.”

“Berry?”

“Bernard Bershaw, our coroner.”

Walker’s voice had started off teasing, but by the time he referred to Lydia, his tone had wavered. Here in his hometown, with a population shy of two thousand, Walker probably knew just about everyone. Living in a city of millions, the chances of knowing the victims are slim, but I could empathize. In all my years covering murders and interviewing loved ones, the only victim I’d ever known personally was Jolene McCall, and the memory of her death would haunt me for the rest of my life.

I kept my gaze carefully focused on Walker to distract myself from what little was left of Lydia. “I’m sorry for your loss. I’m assuming you knew her?”

Walker nodded, staring directly at her body. “Her father was the police chief here for years. He just recently retired. We worked on several cases together, and he always carried wallets of his girls. Lydia was his youngest.”

Walker wasn’t giving me background for the case. His words were more about grief than investigation, but something about his story struck a chord inside me, and God help me, I was hard-wired to pluck at it, grief or not.

From experience, I knew that people didn’t respond well to personal questions at a crime scene. They took offense, no matter the intention, because it made them feel suspect. So I made my voice as soft and innocent as I could before asking my question, which, considering my five foot two, one hundred ten-pound frame, could usually sound quite sweet despite my actual disposition. “Did Lydia have a boyfriend?”

Walker’s gaze snapped up to meet mine. My tone hadn’t fooled him. “What are you getting at?”

I shrugged and kept my gaze honed on his. “It’s just a question.”

“And I want to know why you’re asking it.”

“Ex-police chief’s youngest daughter takes a stroll at dusk, why? Because she loves the last burning rays of sunlight?” I kept my face neutral and let Walker make the connection himself.

Walker’s face flushed. “This was an animal attack.”

“It certainly looks like it.” I conceded. “But what things are and what they look like aren’t always the same.”

Walker shook his head, but his mouth clamped shut.

“It’s just a question, Walker.”

“A question that didn’t need asking,” Walker insisted. “In this town, we don’t look under rocks that best lay put to rest. Maybe Lydia had a boyfriend and maybe she didn’t. It’s best to let the family grieve in peace without questions and rumors unearthing pain over an animal attack.”

“You don’t know whether or not she had a boyfriend,” I pushed.

He sighed. “I don’t know. Her father never mentioned her having one.”

“Does she have a best friend? Or is she particularly close to one of her sisters?”

“You’re not letting this go, are you? You’re gonna poke at wounds and make them fester over what is clearly an animal attack.”

“You brought me here knowing my propensity for questions. I’m just doing my job.”

Walker crossed his arms. “And what’s that?”

“To face the facts and find the truth.”

“This was an animal attack,” Walker repeated, but he sounded exhausted.

“Yes, and I’m sure she sincerely loved taking walks at dusk,” I said, trying to pump sincerity into my voice. “But I’m also sure that’s not the whole truth. She told someone the real reason for taking nightly sunset strolls, and that’s the person I need to interview.”

The crunch of gravel groaned from around the bend in the road. Walker shifted his gaze and waved to the approaching van behind me.

“You can’t just knock on strangers’ doors and start asking questions like you do in the city. They don’t know you here. They’ll clam up.”

I stared at him for a long moment. “But they know you. Since it’s a case you’ll be working on, maybe you can help me interview witnesses while I’m in town.”

Walker shook his head slowly, but when he met my gaze, a wide smile crept over his features. “You’re relentless, DiRocco.”

“Only with things that matter,” I said.

A car door slammed, and Walker stepped forward to greet the person behind me. As Walker passed he leaned down, and the heady spice of his cologne made me want to lean in.

“I’ll see what I can do,” he whispered.

* * * *

Walker greeted Berry with a back-pounding, handshake-hug. When he stepped back to introduce me, I shook Berry’s hand, looked up to meet his gaze, and kept looking up. Berry was a ruddy, solid man whose family life and career choice had replaced what had probably been a promising future in professional basketball. Most people towered over me, but Berry was exceptionally tall, made only taller-looking by his string bean-like appendages. By his slight hunch, I’d wager he was just as aware of his height as I was of mine. He was kind and quiet as he handled Lydia’s remains, but despite Walker’s claim that animal attacks were a common occurrence upstate, Berry had obviously not grown accustomed to witnessing such carnage.

Lydia had been lovely, with wide doll eyes and wavy, light brown hair. Her face and upper chest were relatively intact; I could still see past the few lacerations across her cheeks and shoulders to the person she’d been before the attack. The rest of her, however, hadn’t fared as well.

From her upper chest down, Lydia’s remains were scattered in ragged parts, detached organs, and indecipherable pieces. Long shreds of tissue still connected her left arm to her shoulder, but Berry found the marker for her right arm further into the woods. Her abdomen had been raked by claws, spilling her intestines. They stretched in a long, tangled pile next to the unnatural angle of her left leg. The jagged break of her shin tore through the skin just under her knee. Nothing remained of her right leg except shreds of muscle and tendon. If a scrap of skin had survived, I couldn’t see it beneath all the blood.

The sight made Jillian stir inside my mind. I could feel her struggle on the opposite end of the mental twine connecting us; she hadn’t fed in weeks, not since I’d entranced her to save Dominic from her betrayal. She and her partner, Kaden, were supposed to have been executed for their crimes against the coven, for their crimes against me, but despite Dominic’s assurances that their sentences had been carried out, I could still feel her.

One last, frayed thread still connected our minds, and she wouldn’t let go.

The sweltering burns over Jillian’s body singed mine, as if we were imprisoned inside an oven, roasting in its confinement. I could feel her rage, as searing as the surrounding heat, as she envisioned and reveled in the thought of Dominic’s slow and gruesome death.

Examining Lydia’s remains was disturbing on many levels, with or without or without Jillian stirring my thoughts, but worse than the brutality of Lydia’s injuries was my reaction to them. Gazing at her blood made my throat convulse in a dry, scratchy swallow. My skin itched from the inside, like I’d resisted a hit and needed a fix, except instead of narcotics, I’d found a gruesome crime scene. God help me, there shouldn’t have been anything here to resist.

I glanced at Walker and Berry to see if they’d noticed my distraction. With Lydia center stage, no one was looking at me.

Berry placed two fingers on her neck, but it was a perfunctory measure. Lydia didn’t have a pulse. We could see through the right side of her neck and the shredded tissue of her esophagus to the glistening stacks of her spinal column. Her blood was not pumping. Berry glanced at his watch briefly and stood.

“Time of death, 2000 hours.”

Walker let a moment pass before he spoke. “How would you like to start?”

Berry cleared his throat. “I have a container as well as the body bag. Let’s get as much of her as possible on the gurney and go from there.”

Although some of Lydia was still whole and recognizable, not much of her parts were still attached by sturdy tissue. Walker and Berry lifted her upper body, left arm, torso, and left leg into the body bag in one smooth motion, but mid-move, half of her palm and three fingers fell to the ground. Walker picked up the fallen appendage and placed it gently in the container with her other severed body parts, but watching a piece of her physically detach from the whole was somehow worse. Berry couldn’t stomach it. He left for a five-minute break, which Walker and I both encouraged him to take, but honestly, I just wanted to finish as quickly as possible and get the hell out of the woods.

If Berry had been a cop, his squeamishness would have been poked and prodded at by his fellow officers until they had either razzed it out of him or he found a new occupation—I’d witnessed Harroway’s interaction with some of his new partners and experienced it several times myself from covering cases with him and Greta. Luckily for Berry, he wasn’t a police officer, and Walker and I would give him all the time and support he needed. Unfortunately for Walker’s animal attack theory, people don’t lose their cookies over scenes they witness regularly. Animal attacks might be more common here than in the city, but something was obviously different about Lydia’s attack, something which—despite Walker’s misgivings—I intended to find out.

Forty-five minutes later, Lydia was safely transported into the back of Berry’s van. Berry turned to shut the back doors, and I could see the dread in his expression at the thought of having to reopen them at the morgue. Walker was scanning the ground for anything we may have missed, so before I lost the opportunity for a one-on-one with Berry, I sidled up to the van and slammed one of the doors shut for him.

“Thank you, ma’am. I’m much obliged,” Berry said in the same slow, warm drawl as Walker. He slammed the other door shut, so it latched into mine.

“You’re welcome. Walker’s a good friend, and I’m happy to help.”

Berry adjusted his John Deere baseball hat. “I heard the two of you survived a dangerous case in the city. Something about a gang war?”

It had actually been Jillian leading the vampire uprising, but until I figured out how to reveal the existence of vampires without subjecting everyone to their mercy, I just nodded. “Something like that.”

“I heard he was glad to have you around then, so we are certainly glad to have you here now.”

“Thank you.” I took a deep breath. “Would you mind if I asked you a few questions?”

Berry smiled. The movement creased and cracked every plane of his weathered face. “I can’t say that Walker didn’t warn me.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Did he?”

“Yes, ma’am, he did.”

“Whatever you say can be off the record, if you’d prefer.”

Berry’s smile widened. I hadn’t thought that his face could further wrinkle, but it did. I couldn’t help but smile back. “Ask your questions, Miss DiRocco,” he encouraged.

“Just ‘DiRocco’ is fine.”

He nodded.

“How long have you been a coroner?”

“Goin’ on twelve years now. My daddy was the coroner and his daddy was the coroner before him. I grew up in the business and wouldn’t have it any other way. People in this town often fill in their parents’ shoes, and I wasn’t much of an exception, I suppose. And proud of it.”

I nodded. “It sounds like you enjoy your work.”

“In general, yes. There’s a lot of great folks in town, and helpin’ their loved ones pass, helpin’ them grieve, has been more than a business. It’s my life’s work.”