Page 10 of White Wolf

“It’s a bite mark, all right,” she said. “Unmistakably human. Except for these.” She touched the punctures with her gloved pinky. “These were made by something much sharper than human teeth. Obviously. A small knife maybe.” Her smile was tight and humorless. “Meat thermometer maybe.”

Trina glanced over at her partner and Lanny mouthedmeat thermometer?with his brows up at his hairline.

“In any event, the bite isn’t what killed him,” Harvey continued. “Your killer was tall enough and strong enough” – she put her hands on Chad Edwards’ head – “to wrench his head sideways, like this, and snap his vertebrae. I swabbed the wound, and the lab’s running DNA analysis on it now. Maybe we’ll get lucky and the perp will be in the system.” She shrugged like she doubted so; Trina doubted too. It was never as easy as it looked on TV.

“Another thing,” Harvey continued, perking up, gaze coming to Trina and then Lanny, swapping a look between them. “Before he was killed, he lost a lot of blood.”

“How much is a lot?” Lanny asked.

Trina felt the goosebumps of last night return, the tightening at the back of her neck.

“Well, we always see lividity with bodies by this point. And we found him lying on his back, so that’s where the blood would have collected. But,” Harvey said, and lifted at the boy’s shoulder so they could see his back. Smooth and pale. “There’s none. Before whoever it was broke his neck, they drained him almost dry.”

The room seemed to tilt. “There wasn’t any blood at the scene,” Trina said.

Harvey looked straight at her, a glint of something uncharacteristic in her eyes: doubt. “No, there wasn’t.”

~*~

The detective bullpen always quieted down after nightfall. A few lingered at their desks, but the big overhead fluorescents were turned off in favor of the muted glow of desk lamps. Phone calls were made in quiet voices. The loudest sounds were made by the printer, the copier, and the coffee machine, punctuated by the soft rustle of file pages shuffling.

“Here.” Lanny set a steaming cup of coffee down on her blotter before he walked around to settle into his own desk chair.

“If I have one more sip of coffee, I’ll throw up,” Trina said, and then took a sip anyway. She didn’t throw up, so that was something. But her stomach twisted unhappily. She needed food, preferably something green and semi-nutritious.

Lanny pulled out his bottom desk drawer and retrieved a half-full bottle of Jim Beam. He poured two generous glugs into his own coffee and waved the bottle in offering.

She gave him a flat look.

“It’ll make you feel better,” he said with a tired half-smile.

“It’ll put me to sleep.”

“Good. You need to sleep.”

“And you don’t?”

“Nah. I can run all night.” He put the bourbon back in the drawer and shut it with a solidthump. “You’ll be wishing you had some in a minute. Just say when.”

Trina bit back another retort and tried to focus on the notes in front of her, her vision blurry. She blinked and blinked…and it didn’t clear. “Shit,” she muttered, giving up and rubbing her eyes with her fists like a little girl. “Time is it?”

“Nine-fifteen.” Lanny’s voice was thick and scratchy. She figured her own didn’t sound much better.

It had been a long, unproductive day. From the morgue they’d gone to Chad Edwards’ apartment, where they found nothing but trendy clothes, stacks of used textbooks, and the expected clutter of a two-bedroom cramped by three renters. From there it was to see the kids’ parents: a graying, grieving couple out on Long Island who couldn’t seem to wrap their heads around the loss, insisting that their son’s murder must have been some sort of mistake because “everybody loved him.”

They’d talked to classmates, the professor he worked for, the staff from Angelo’s – nobody had seen a damn thing. Nobody seemed to think that anyone would have reason to kill Chad.

It was another of those miserable cases destined for the cold case boxes in the basement. Unless the lab turned up something useful, or someone stepped forward, there was a slim chance they’d be able to pin down the murderer.

“You’re thinking pretty loud over there,” Lanny said.

When she glanced up she found him leaning back in his chair, tossing his stress ball from hand to hand, eyelids flagging. Face shadowed unevenly with lamplight, he didn’t just look tired, suddenly, but sick. Scraped-raw and sleepless and older than he was.

What’s wrong, she almost said, but she swallowed it down. He would only deflect her like he’d been doing all day.

Instead, she cupped her chin in her hands and, worn down by the day and the night before, said, “Maybe it’s stupid, but the weirdness of this case is really bothering me.”

Lanny didn’t laugh at her. He made a thoughtful face. “Remember that case we had last year? The one with those devil-worshiper assholes who were doing the–”

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