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“Are you sure it’s him?” Roth asked.
“One hundred percent? No,” I said. “But I’ll go with at least ninety-nine percent sure. I recognize the stain on his shirt.” No sense explaining why I’d remember a thing like that.
“Ah, my Angel of Death comes through for me yet again,” Derrel said with a grin as he scribbled on his pad. “You are a goddess.”
Roth gave an emphatic nod. “We’ll verify with prints, but that gives us a big head start.” His lips twitched. “So to speak,” he added. Then he gave me a wink right before elbowing his partner. “C’mon, Mike, what do you say?”
Abadie gave a sour sigh. “I’m sorry I doubted you,” he said in the kind of monotone used by six-year-olds when forced to give an apology. “Thank you for saving us from tedious legwork.”
The two turned away to report this information to their superiors, and Derrel sidled up to me, amusement dancing in his eyes.
“My god, Angel,” he said in a low voice. “It was worth getting up early for that alone.” At my perplexed look he grinned. “I’ve been waiting for an excuse to call Mike a cocky asstard for ages. I loved it.”
I laughed weakly. “I didn’t exactly plan it. But sometimes it burns me the way they. . . .” I couldn’t figure out how to say what I wanted to say.
“The way they dismiss you because you’re not one of them? And in your case it doesn’t help that you’re a convicted felon, which in the eyes of idiots like Mike, puts you several levels below him.”
I flushed at the reminder of my history, and Derrel lightly thwapped me on the head with his pen. “Stop it. You’re a smart chick. The people who matter have noticed that fact. Mike’s a dick. Besides,” he jerked his head toward the body on the ground, “you saved me a bunch of work. I’m pretty cool with that.”
I didn’t know how to respond to that, but I was saved by a small commotion from the south end of the pond. I looked over to see a couple of uniformed deputies along with a woman with a dog on a leash—all looking fairly pleased about something. I recognized the woman as the same dog handler who’d been at the other headless body crime scene: Marianne, Ed’s girlfriend.
“I’ll be right back, Angel,” Derrel said. “Unless you need help getting him into the bag?”
I shook my head. “I can handle this one.” I’d learned the trick of rolling bodies into bags my first week. I wouldn’t even need to use my zombie super strength.
He gave me a parting wink, then headed in the direction of the detectives. I crouched and began to wrap the stump of Zeke’s neck in the sheet. So if Zeke isn’t the rogue, who is? I wondered in uneasy frustration. Or maybe I was wrong about the whole thing. Kang said there weren’t very many zombies, so what were the chances of two zombies being hard up for brains in the same area? Then again, I had no idea what Kang meant by “not many.” Could be five, could be a hundred.
I opened the body bag, smoothly rolled the body into it, snapped the toe tag onto the right foot. Probably not a hundred, I decided. There’s no way enough people could die to support that many. I tried to do some mental math in an attempt to figure out how many zombies could live on the number of people who died in St. Edwards Parish, but gave up as soon as I realized I would need to do division in my head.
Pulling the zipper closed, I glanced up in time to see Marianne headed my way, pulled along by a very eager dog.
“You must be Angel,” the petite woman said breathlessly as the dog stopped in front of me. “Ed and Marcus have told me about you. So nice to finally meet you!”
I straightened and gave her a smile. “Hi, yeah, I’m Angel. You’re Marianne, right?”
She bobbed her head in a yes, then dipped her chin toward the dog who was sitting and staring at me intently. “And this here is Kudzu.” She frowned at the dog, then rolled her eyes. “Oh, you silly mutt. She’s not a corpse.”
I could feel the blood drain from my face, but thankfully Marianne kept right on talking and didn’t seem to notice. “She’s a cadaver dog, see? And she’s smelling the body you have in the bag, and probably your clothes as well since you wear them in the morgue, right?” I nodded but she kept on going. Damn good thing since I wasn’t quite sure if I’d recovered the ability to speak yet. “We came out to see if we could find this poor guy’s head, but instead we stumbled across a little campsite where he’s probably been living.” She shook her head. “What an awful, awful thing.” She tugged at the leash and the dog obediently returned to her side.>I made my way carefully over the uneven ground, breathing a silent sigh of relief when I saw, through the group of people, the lower half of a body lying facedown. Definitely an adult. Damn good. I didn’t even mind that I’d have to carry him over all that ground.
Then the people moved, and I saw why the upper ranks were at the scene.
Oh, shiiiiiiit.
I moved forward toward the headless body, anger and bile filling my gut—at Zeke for not finding another way to control his hunger, and at Kang for his callous acceptance that a zombie could go rogue like this. I knew I was being pretty smug and sanctimonious, especially considering I had a fairly reliable source of brains, but even though the job had been handed to me I still worked my ass off and did what I had to do to keep it. Not like Zeke, who’d stolen from goddamn bodies. What the hell had he been thinking? Why would anyone whose existence depended on a job choose to fuck it up like that?
I shook my head. Yeah, I was fully aware of the irony of my train of thoughts. Maybe I was beginning to learn a thing or two.
“Less for you to carry again, Angel.”
I glanced up to see Detective Roth giving me a sour smile. “Yeah, but this whole losing your head thing is getting old,” I replied.
“Tell me about it.” He ran a hand through his bristly hair and grimaced.
I let my gaze sweep the surroundings. “Who found the body?”
His grimace deepened. “A couple of kids taking a shortcut to their bus stop. High school age, but still. . . .”
“That’ll give ‘em nightmares,” I said with a shudder.
