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“Maybe. We can come back to that.”
Barbara hadn’t raised the issue of the staged footage yet. She wanted her ducks neatly lined up first. She raised one of the boy’s hands. It felt stiff as a mannequin. No scrapes or torn nails, although they were a little long, and dirty.
“Did the doctor take any samples for forensic analysis?” she asked Nicholls.
“That’s a little outside of his job description.”
“Of course.”
And he’s lazy, Barbara thought.
She squinted. She could see a tiny bit of thread caught in one nail. She crouched down and delved into her backpack. She brought out tweezers and a small plastic baggy. Then she gently plucked the fiber from the nail and dropped it into the bag. She would send any samples back to Anchorage.
She moved back up the body to the boy’s throat. The wound was ugly. Messy. To her practiced eye, it looked like the teeth that had inflicted the damage had been blunt. That didn’t discount a member of the Colony. It took a while for some vampyr’s incisors to fully erupt. And some older colony members had been known to file down their distinctive “fangs,” still wary of persecution. But then, it didn’t discount a human either. A human jaw didn’t pack quite as much power, but our teeth had also evolved to rip and tear meat. She circled, taking photographs.
“Wound consistent with biting. Flesh has been torn, some flesh looks to have been excised, maybe swallowed.”
“He got his throat ripped out?” Nicholls said.
“In layman’s terms, yes, sir.”
Barbara reached for another plastic baggy and a scalpel. She took a small sample of flesh from around the wound and dropped it in the bag before sealing it. Vampyr DNA was almost identical to human DNA. Unreliable as evidence, but it could still help back up a case. Finally, she took her molding equipment out of the bag and started to place the malleable material around the throat wound.
“What are you doing?” Nicholls asked.
“Taking a mold of the bite. It might help establish any distinctive teeth marks.”
“What for?”
Barbara straightened. “Sir, my job is to collect all the evidence. I would like to see an individual held to account, rather than a mass cull for no good reason.”
Nicholls looked set to argue. Barbara deliberately turned back to Marcus’s body and carefully peeled the hardened mold off. She dropped it into another baggy. And then she paused. Something else had caught her attention. A mark on Marcus’s shoulder. She frowned.
“Chief, can you just help me roll Marcus a little here?”
He sighed but acquiesced, gently helping her roll the stiff body to the right. Barbara peered at Marcus’s back. The skin was darker and mottled here, where the blood had started to settle, but she could still make out a distinctive tattoo just above his left shoulder blade: two black stakes forming a cross over a pair of sharp incisors. Barbara’s stomach turned.
“You see this?” she said to Nicholls.
“I see it.” His voice was tight.
“You know what it is?”
In an irritated tone: “This is Alaska, Detective, not the other side of the moon. It’s a Helsing tattoo.”
She nodded. “A hate symbol. Supporting the genocide of vampyrs.”
“Kids get all sorts of tattoos.”
“Not like this. Far as I know, most tattooists wouldn’t undertake this piece of work. Gets back to them, they lose their license.”
The tattoo was a strong statement. Akin to a swastika. It troubled Barbara that a fifteen-year-old had a tattoo like this. She took several photos, then let Marcus’s body roll back on to the steel table. She peeled off her latex gloves.
“Why wasn’t this in the report?” she asked Nicholls. “Surely Dr. Dalton must have noticed it?”
His jaw tightened. “The kid had a tattoo. Kids do shitty things to rebel, to piss off their parents. Doesn’t mean he was a bad kid. It’s not relevant.”
“It’s not up to you to decide what is relevant.”
