Page 8 of Golden Eagle

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Lanny left the club feeling like he hadn’t accomplished what he’d set out to, but he’d tried, and that was what counted, right?

Trina would give him The Look, he knew. Ask him why he hadn’t tried a little harder, expressed himself a little more clearly. “We talked about this, Lanny,” she’d sigh.

As if thoughts of her had summoned her telepathically, his phone rang. He fished it out of his pocket and answered it with a cheery, “Hey, babe.”

“How badly did you fuck it up?” she asked.

“Hey, excuse you. Why do you assume the worst?”

She didn’t answer; he could envision her face.

“Look, it’s not my fault your gramps is having a big bisexual crisis or something.”

A couple passing the other way on the sidewalk gave him a sharp look.

Trina sighed. “Ugh, you’re terrible.”

“What part of that statement wasn’t true? And I tried, okay? He’s a stubborn asshole.”

She sighed again, softer this time. “Yeah, I know. Where are you now, have you left yet?”

“Walking back now.”

“Meet me at the hospital instead. Harvey has something she wants to show us.”

Alarms chimed in the back of his mind. “Oh shit, what?”

“She said it was our kind of thing, so I’m thinking…monsters.”

~*~

It took a lot to impress Trina, especially these days, but Christine Harvey managed with flying colors. She’d taken the knowledge that Trina’s great-grandfather was not only still alive, but young-looking, and a vampire, in stride like a champ. Had even helped them by looking at Sasha after his imprisonment, testing his blood for drugs to the best of her ability. She’d just rolled with it, the knowledge that immortals existed, and that they could present a problem in New York.

“So,” she said now, peeling back the sheet that covered the face of her latest DB. “Something tore his throat out.”

That Trina could see, going by the gory wound in the poor man’s neck, clotted with dry, blackened blood.

“And gutted him, too,” Harvey added.

“Seriously?”

“Yeah. If I didn’t know better, I’d say it was a bear attack.”

“Yikes,” Lanny said with a wince.

Harvey sent him a look. “Yeah. Yikes.”

“Hey.” He held up both hands, which just served to highlight his grungy old workout gear. “I never gutted anybody, okay? I’m all about that pig’s blood life.”

Trina sighed. “We got a name?”

The case had come in to Simms and Bukowski, but Harvey had called them when she got the body on her table. She didn’t even bother to consult the chart, now. “Walter Rendell. Forty-eight. He’s a contractor who was overseeing the new Adamant building – it’s an accounting firm. They had a new-build going in, and he was pulling double shifts, according to his colleagues. Was at the site last night, after everyone else. They found him this morning, torn to pieces.”

Trina looked down at the wound in his throat and her stomach quailed. She remembered a manor house in Virginia, Sasha unconscious, and wolf-shaped. “Any chance the wounds were made with a human weapon of some sort?”

“This is punctures and tears. No clean edges, like from a knife. Not of any kind I’ve seen, at least.”

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