Right. That made sense. And Bruiser had not told me that because I was supposed to draw my own conclusions. Basic police work. Everybody observe, then everybody share. Conclusions were more likely to be correct with that formula than if one person told all the others, which would slant everything. I understood it, but it ticked me off.
“Whatever we think we know about the night Joses went missing,” I said, staring at the crystal, “is wrong.”
Eli agreed with a slight nod. Though his words were unspoken, I could hear him thinking about the crystal, his thoughts probably paralleling my own. He said, “No mention of a dead fanghead.”
Pinkie cleared her throat warningly, but Eli didn’t retract his fanghead insult with the more polite Mithran. He squatted onto the balls of his feet and gestured to the vamp. “Something in her fingers, hidden by her dress, and”—he bent in closer—“she’s wearing a glove on this hand.”
I moved to his side as he pulled a thin-bladed knife, leaned forward, and pressed the flat of the blade against the striped dress fabric. Rather than moving, the skirt of the dress crumbled with a dry shushing sound and fell into dust on the chewed glove beneath, exposing what she had held.
The female vamp had been holding a silver stake in her gloved right hand. The tip was corroded, as if vamp blood had been on it.
“Huh,” I said.
“Who was here that night? Could you tell?” Eli asked. Meaning could I smell them.
“This much blood and this many years makes it hard to smell anything,” I said, telling the truth and yet not answering the question.
Pinkie looked at me curiously. It was obvious that she hadn’t heard the whole “Jane turned into a mountain lion in Leo’s car” story that was still making the vamp rounds.
“Would you excuse us?” I asked her. Pinkie’s pink brows went up, making her forehead do that wrinkly thing again, but she nodded and walked away. When I heard her patent leather shoes tapping on the stairs I said quietly, “I remember seeing a painting at vamp HQ on sub-four. Adrianna and a blond vamp, arms around each other. They looked chummy. I’ve never seen the blonde alive except in the painting, so this could be her. Maybe.”
“Chummy in a culturally appropriate way for the time, or in an ‘into her panties’ kind of way?” Eli asked. “Because if they were lovers and she died here . . .”
That was a really good question and a better observation. “If they were lovers, then we have motive for a lot of things.” More softly, I said, “And if the broken crystal means what I think it does, then we have a lot more interesting things going on than we anticipated.”
“I’ll take a photo shoot on sub-four,” Eli said. “Been meaning to get photos of all the paintings down there before they get moved to Leo’s new place. Scents?” he reminded me.
“I should have changed into a bloodhound before we opened the door, and it’s too late now. The scents are so faint that it’s going to be impossible to tell which people were here before the death, during the death, or after the death. I smell Joses—Joseph—though not with the sick smell he had hanging on the wall in sub-five. Here he smelled the way he did in the kill bar; the walls here are permeated with his scent, meaning that he stayed here for a long time. I smell Adrianna and the dead vamp. I smell Leo and Bethany and Sabina and another male vamp who could be Amaury, and maybe an arcenciel.” I frowned, not knowing how to deal with the other scent I had picked up, except that it couldn’t be kept a secret. “Most importantly, I smell Immanuel.”
“The thing masquerading as Leo’s son?” Eli looked around the room as if the creature I had killed might be hiding in a shadow.
“The u’tlun’ta,” I said. “Liver-eater. Spear-finger.”
“The insane skinwalker,” Eli said, gently, shifting his eyes up to me from where he crouched on the floor.
I couldn’t make myself look at him, but I nodded. “The thing I’ll turn into someday, when I’m old and go insane and start eating people.”
“You don’t know that. What we do know is that Immanuel spent decades trying to find ways to greater power and ways to control the psychosis that was eating away at his mind,” Eli said. “Not your mind. His.”
I nodded, knowing Eli was right, but not knowing how his thinking would relate to my possible future. As far as I had been able to determine, skinwalkers all went nutso and started eating humans.
“So,” Eli went on, “if we look at this crime scene in light of that need—the need to hold on to his sanity—why was he here? What did he hope to accomplish?”
I shrugged. I had killed Immanuel, the only other skinwalker I had met in modern times. The insanity of the psychotic killing machine had been a vision into my own future unless I died first, which seemed a much better alternative than eating my friends.
“Jane!” Eli said, his voice harsh, cracking like a whip. I snapped my head to him. “Do your job.”
I blinked and took a breath. Smelling the stink and the age and the puzzle before us. “Yeah.” I blew out the breath. “Thanks. If we look at Immanuel’s modus operandi, he took power by drinking down lots of humans, and vamps with more power than he had. So maybe he and Adrianna and our headless Barbie here busted in and tried to drink Joses down. Maybe they wanted to kill him. Maybe they let him drink from them. Only problem is that Leo said Adrianna was with him the night Joses disappeared. Did she do Leo and then come here? To barter with Joseph? More blood and sex for the favor Leo refused her?”
“No damage to the door,” Eli said, his eyes scouting the room again, “so she didn’t break in.” He stood and stepped to the tea trolley. “Three cups, but four saucers. No, wait.” He leaned into the wall and said, “Four. One on the floor, broken. Santana was expecting company. He welcomed them in, brought them upstairs where it was private, got room service or a servant to send up tea. It started out proper and polite.”
“Okay,” I said. “I can see that. So maybe they were going to have tea and crumpets, or a business meeting, or a group blood and sex orgy, and things got out of hand.”
“Or maybe they were going to let him feed off them in return for a sip of his blood. It’s powerful enough for Leo to hold him prisoner for over a century so he could drink it. It had to pack an even bigger punch when Joseph was sane and well fed with the blood of other vamps.”