“But we should have still found a nude human passed out near the crime scene, and we didn’t.”
“I told them that not all lycanthropes have to fall into a comalike sleep after they switch back to human form, but they didn’t want to believe me,” Edward said.
“Why not? You’re right,” I said.
“Because all the literature says that they fall into a deep, almost comalike sleep after they shift from animal to human form,” Pearson said.
“Unless you think you two boyos know more than all the other experts combined?”
“On this, yes, because the books you’re reading are from people who studied lycanthropes, interviewed them. I live with them,” I said.
“I’m just good friends with them,” Edward said in his Ted voice, “but that’s still more personal than the book experts.”
“How can you be so certain of that?” Sheridan asked.
“Because we read the same books you’re reading,” I said, “and I read them before I was close to any shapeshifter. Most of them do have to sleep it off, almost like a blackout drunk. In fact, a lot of the ones that sleep hard like that don’t remember most of their night in animal form.”
“But you’re saying that some of them just change to human form and can walk away from a scene like this?” Sheridan asked.
“Absolutely.”
“Is this the point where I say I told you so?” Edward asked in a heavy down-home accent.
“Only if you’re not the gentleman I know you are,” Sheridan said with a smile.
Edward gave her a smile and a little nod. If his hat had still been on his head he’d have tipped it at her. I couldn’t tell if he was flirting with her, or he was so far into his part as Ted that he couldn’t react any other way.
“So you were right about her, Forrester,” Logan said as he continued to pace the wall by the door. “You trained her. You taught her everything she knows.”
“Oh no, Logan. I trained Anita to be better at killing the monsters. She taught me how to understand them better.”
“Thanks, Ted, and thanks for nothing, Logan. Just love it when men assume that because there’s a man in a woman’s life they teach us everything we know.”
He scowled at me, but he was an amateur compared to Nolan. “It’s just a figure of speech, Blake.”
“You just keep telling yourself that, Logan, while the rest of us try to catch the bad guys.”
“What do you mean, bad guys, Blake? You’re here to help us find the vampire that’s behind all this, so it’s just one bad guy.”
“Someone is also killing people by tearing them apart, and that’s probably not a vampire, and there are a couple of neck wounds that don’t show any fangs.”
Edward picked them out of the pile of photos without me needing to point them out. He handed them to me and I held them up to Logan, Pearson, and Sheridan like I was doing show-and-tell. If Nolan wanted to see them better he would have to move his chair. “Did your medical examiner find any marks that couldn’t have been made by human teeth?”
“No,” Pearson said, “but a savage bite like that where the vampire worries at the wound like a terrier with a rat can mask precise dentation.”
I had a moment of doing the long blink while I fought not to remember a vampire doing just that to me. “Anita is very aware of that, Superintendent Pearson.” I looked at Edward. I was trying to ask with my eyes how much show-and-tell he wanted me to do. I had scars that showed exactly the kind of vampire attack that Pearson was talking about.
“Are you trying to tell us we have three different crime sprees in Dublin, including a human serial killer that’s using their teeth to tear out throats?” Logan demanded, stopping in his pacing long enough to look at me.
“No, I’m saying that might be what’s happening. Just because you have vampires and violent crimes in the same city doesn’t mean that all the violence is vampire related.”
“We aren’t trying to blame all our violent crimes on the vampires, Marshal Blake,” Sheridan said. She was standing beside the corkboard. I think she’d gotten up in hopes that Logan would use her chair; no such luck.
“I know that, Inspector Sheridan, but this is a lot of victims to come from just one vampire.”
“We aren’t stupid, Blake. We know that no single vampire could do all this,” Logan said, motioning at the map with a gesture so wide that he almost hit Pearson in the top of the head. Logan either didn’t notice or ignored it, because he didn’t apologize. In fact, he paced around the table again, going behind Nolan—again.
Nolan stood up and went to the far corner of the wall with the window. He put his back in the corner so that there was no possible way for Logan to walk behind him again. He’d told Logan at one point that if he walked behind his chair again he’d put him on the floor, but Pearson had taken offense. He didn’t like Logan either, but Nolan had been forced into his investigation from on high, so Nolan wasn’t his favorite person either. He’d told Nolan, “If you try to put one of my men on the floor, you and I will have words and you will not like them.”
Nolan stood in the corner, glaring at Logan, who walked around the whole table again, crossing behind Edward and me—again. Like I said, the room wasn’t big enough to pace, especially with this many adults already in it.