Page 52 of Golden Eagle

“I know what an alibi is, dipshit, I’m a cop.”

“Of course,” Alexei said, patronizing. “Do you have one?”

He didn’t, and the set of Alexei’s brows made him want to smack the guy. “I’ll – tell her I was mugged, or something.”

“Yes, mugged.” Alexei looked like he suppressed a smile. “You, boxer, cop, vampire, of the turned blood of Grigory Yefimovich, were mugged…and lost.”

“We’ll say there were ten guys.”

“And why didn’t you go home afterward?”

“I…”

“Tell her,” Jamie cut in, setting his bagel down with disgust, “that you got into it with another vampire. Not,” he rushed to say, when Lanny tried to protest, “that you were boxing for money. Shit. No, just say you ran into a hostile vamp on your way home, that you fought, that we helped you, and that you were afraid to lead the guy back to her place.”

“That…doesn’t suck. But I didn’t take any of her calls.”

Jamie huffed in annoyance and returned to his breakfast.

Alexei chuckled and said, “I think you’re on your own for that one.”

~*~

When Trina reached the hospital, that awful rear loading bay entrance she knew so well, she found Harvey standing outside with her shoulders pressed back against the sun-glazed bricks, white coat drawn tight around her middle, smoking a cigarette. She blew out a plume of gray smoke as Trina approached, expression haunted in the fraction of a second before she put her shields up. Then she dropped the cig to the ground, and stubbed it out with the toe of her sneaker.

“No Lanny?”

Trina tamped down the worry that flared to life in her belly. “Just me.” She offered a smile she knew was weak. “Same as the last one?” she asked, propping a shoulder against the wall, wishing, not for the first time, that she smoked, too. Maybe it would settle this burst of nerves.

Harvey folded her arms, fingers twitching restlessly. The wall threatened to crumble, a flash of true fear. “Not exactly. Come take a look.” She paused in the act of punching in the door code. “Did you eat yet?”

Trina’s stomach twisted with dread. “No.”

“Good.”

The coldness of the morgue closed around her, tight and unforgiving as a hand when she followed Harvey inside. The door fell shut behind them with a loud metal clang, and goosebumps broke out down Trina’s arms, beneath her jacket. There was probably no place safer than right here, in the basement of the hospital, behind locked doors, surrounded by dead men without grudges or agendas.

But.

Harvey led the way into her lab, into the smell of old blood and fresh bleach, of chemicals of preservation…and something that wasn’t a scent at all. But a sense. A feeling of wrongness that slid down her back like cold oil.

A white drape covered the big steel table in the center of the room, but the bumps beneath it weren’t large enough to belong to a human body.

Not a whole one, anyway.

Harvey walked around to the far side of the table, snapping on gloves, and Trina moved to stand opposite her with a heavy sort of reluctance. She’d been here dozens of times; hundreds. This was her job. So why was she so hesitant now?

Because for the first time, the murders in this city had a link to her, however tenuous. The people dying had died at the hands of supernatural creatures…and as someone whose entire friend group was now composed of said creatures, it cut too close to the bone.

“Ready?” Harvey asked, and it sounded like an unnecessary kindness.

Trina schooled her features, and shoved the disquiet away. “Yeah.”

Harvey lifted the drape without ceremony.

An arm, hand attached, and a leg, foot missing. Badly mutilated. Unmistakable claw marks down the calf. The worst was the messiness; the way the limbs had obviously sat in the sun for a while, before being found.

“The scene,” Harvey said, sliding into her cold, professional tone; the ME voice of a doctor who’d seen more than her fair share of death, “was not too far from the boathouse in the park. A morning jogger found the remains. Bundt and Crusoe got the case. There was” – she hesitated a moment, a brief falter – “blood. Everywhere. And some other bits of tissue; organs, some bones. These are the only limbs even partially intact. The rest was just…scraps. There are” – she pointed to indicate – “puncture wounds consistent with canine teeth. Scratches consistent with the number of claws and relative size of large canine paws.”

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