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“Ohhh.” She clapped excitedly, like I’d just told her my American Express and I were taking her on a no-limit shopping spree. “Do I get to bite someone?”
If her excitement over bleeding another person fazed Nolan at all, he didn’t show it. The guy had spent way too much time with me and Keaty. I leaned against the closed front door and took another swig of the beer.
“No,” I replied. “But you might need to convince a few city officials they didn’t see anything.”
She shrugged, the delight fading from her face. Compared to some of the other tasks I’d had her perform, it was a little bit low on the excitement scale.
“Whatcha want me ta do?” Nolan asked.
I hadn’t plotted out a role for my new protégé, considering I hadn’t expected him to be here. That didn’t mean he would be useless to me, though. A fresh pair of eyes might be just what I needed. Especially considering how shaken up I still was after the whole claw incident.
“You and I are going to look at some dead bodies.”
The Medical Examiner’s office was in the financial district a few blocks north of City Hall. It was a shade prettier than some of the buildings around it, but that only meant the building was a little older and maintained some of the old brick charm its neighbors never had. It still had the cold gray dullness most municipal buildings did.
Since there was no warmth involved in what went on inside, nothing but the misery radiated onto the exterior surfaces. In the same way a plain building used for happier purposes, like a daycare or a charity headquarters, would look much warmer and more inviting.
Empathetic magic was a funny thing, something even the most mundane of humans were impacted by.
This building didn’t need any wards or magic spells to tell passersby it wasn’t a fun place. The structure screamed of pain and death. There were a lot of angry souls here, coming and going, waiting to be avenged. I wasn’t a big fan of ghosts, and I wasn’t thrilled about going somewhere we were almost sure to find them.
It was like being afraid of snakes and walking into the reptile house at a zoo.
But it wasn’t the ghosts I was here to see. I’d only ever met one who’d been of any use to me, and she was long gone. The rest of them were mute specters, glaring indignantly and rattling their proverbial chains. They gave me the willies. No, I was here for the bodies, not the spirits.
“Cheery place,” Nolan said.
“Tell me about it.”
“It’s not so bad,” Brigit chimed in, always trying to be the silver lining, no matter how black the cloud. “I mean…the…uh…” She screwed up her face and stared at the building, attempting to find the indefinable thing that might make it redeemable. Given enough time, she could find something nice to say about Mussolini, even if it was just that his name rhymed with fettuccine. “The doors are awfully pretty,” she concluded.
The doors were a nice touch. Big, dark wood, they were intricately carved with depictions of angels on one side and devils on another. Quite a fancy statement piece for a place where bodies got diced up into their component bits.
I sent Brigit in first so she could convince the desk clerk we were expected. Given my success with Gabriel earlier in the evening, I might have been able to do it myself, but Brigit could turn the thrall on and off like a light bulb. She’d been a vampire less than a year, and she was already proving to be a natural at being undead.
A few minutes later she stepped back through the doors and waved us in. The desk clerk smiled at us like we were old friends. He was a plump, blond man with patchy red skin, but his smile was the warmest I’d seen all night.
“Have fun, y’all.” His head bobbed like he was agreeing with his own statement.
Brigit patted him on the cheek as we passed and slipped his magnetic keycard out of his front pocket. My little ward, a grownup. Made my heart glow with a peculiar sort of pride.
Beside the elevator bay was a black board with white letters on it announcing which offices and departments were on which floor. The main autopsy bays and body storage, more politely called “Processing” and “Morgue”, were located on the second basement level. I knew a few morgues around town where they’d started storing bodies on the higher levels, in better-lit rooms. Those were favorites of the vampire council, because any dead vamps who ended up t
here turned to ash come daylight.
I wanted to see if there was anything on these girls that might indicate something otherworldly had killed them. Anything other than Gabriel. It wasn’t common for me to cross my fingers and hope a vampire had killed someone, but at least if that was the case, swift justice was at my disposal. I wouldn’t even need to make a phone call to issue the warrant. That power was mine now.
We rode the elevator down, and I tried to ignore Brigit and Nolan’s cutesy whispering and playful touching. I couldn’t wrap my head around the two of them as a couple. The door opened into a sterile white hallway that reeked of ammonia and bleach. Our shoes squeaked on the floor as we moved, it was so clean. There were four doors, one on each side of the elevator, and a matching one across the hall from those. Each was marked with a number and a chart on the door to indicate the bodies held within.
“We’re looking for Fitzpatrick, Keller and Ferris,” I informed them.
The three of us split up to check the doors for the corresponding names. I hit pay dirt on the last door. All three women and one Jane Doe were stored within. Brigit used her stolen keycard to provide us access to the room. Inside, the room temperature was a good ten degrees cooler than the hall outside.
All the better to keep your corpses fresh with, my dear.
Built into the back wall were six metal cabinets. In the middle of the floor was a table on wheels, a light stand and an empty instrument tray. On one side of the room were several glass-paneled storage units containing everything from cotton balls and rubber gloves to scalpels and bone saws. I knew what was in each cabinet because the doors contained a meticulous list of the contents.
The antiseptic smell was stronger in here than in the hall as well. I opened one of the storage cabinets and handed Nolan and Brigit each a pair of rubber surgical gloves before putting on my own. I didn’t need us leaving anything behind that might prove we’d been in this room. Fingerprints in the elevator and the exterior hall were one thing—anyone could get there and likely dozens of people a day touched those surfaces. A poorly placed fingerprint on a body, on the other hand, could lead to some unpleasant implications.
