I turned back to the living room. I wasn’t sure how useful I would be on the clue front either, since all my experience with crime scenes involved trying to destroy them, but I wandered around the room, taking it in. I kept an ear on Jesse’s conversation with Aaron, but the forensic details didn’t really interest me. Besides, Jesse would translate the information into whatever I needed to know.
When you got past the death stench, the whole room had an underlying smell that I naturally associated with old man. Karl Schmidt had been in his eighties, which made his odd death even stranger. If you want to kill a man that old, there are a hundred easier ways to do it, all of which would get less interest from the police.
I scanned the titles on the bookshelf, which looked like standard old-man picks: Louis L’Amour, Agatha Christie, and a decent amount of nonfiction covering two subjects: baseball and World War II. At the end of the shelf, I picked up a photograph in a simple oak frame: an elderly man sitting at a picnic table, the kind of thing they had at every public park in LA. He was surrounded by children: mugging on the bench next to him, laughing at his feet, even a couple hanging over his shoulder. The youngest, a girl of about three, sat in his lap looking content as hell. Schmidt and his grandchildren, probably. I counted twelve of them, ranging in age from toddlers to maybe twenty or twenty-one.
I studied Schmidt’s face. While the children had light brown skin, he was alabaster-pale, with faded blue eyes sunk into a deeply wrinkled face. He appeared to be in very good shape for his age—I could see the muscle definition on his forearm, where it was looped carefully around the girl in his lap. The old man was smiling, but it was a worried, protective smile, like he needed to stay on guard lest someone run up and snatch the children away from him.
I realized that the voices behind me had risen in volume, and turned around. Aaron and Jesse were still standing near the armchair, but their body language was combative. “—which you’d know if you hadn’t decided to cash out of doing your job,” Aaron was snapping.
Jesse didn’t take the bait, but he looked like he was losing patience. “You know this isn’t about that, Jay.”
“Isn’t it?” Aaron waved his arms to indicate the room. “How do I know you’re not just here to write a sequel?”
Wyatt was raising his eyebrows at me from the doorway, asking if it was time to press Aaron. Jesse caught the look and shook his head. “I just want to understand,” he said to Aaron. “Schmidt was sitting in the chair, watching TV, and someone came in and made him kneel down so they could behead him. But what was the weapon?”
“You tell me, supercop,” Aaron said snidely, crossing his arms over his chest.
“Okay, that’s enough,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Wyatt, if you would help Mr. Aaron with his cooperation skills?” I pulled in my radius.
Wyatt, now a vampire again, took a step toward Aaron . . . but he paused, his nostrils flaring briefly. I was about to ask, but he shook his head a little and advanced on the criminologist, who shrank away from him, backing up toward my end of the room. Unfortunately for Aaron, eye contact was all Wyatt needed. “Answer our questions,” he said in a perfectly level voice, his eyes drilling into Aaron’s. “And keep a civil tongue in your head.”
The smaller man sort of went slack, then nodded. Jesse sighed, not liking any of this. I couldn’t really blame him. “What kind of weapon was used?” he asked. “An ax?”
“No,” Aaron said in a wooden voice, his eyes locked on Wyatt. “We have to do further testing, but the angle of blood spatter suggests some sort of machete or sword.”
Jesse and I exchanged a bewildered look. A sword? Like an actual motherfucking sword? I knew lots of vampires who carried knives so they could make a quick little cut to feed from instead of using their teeth. But a sword was impractical and raised too many questions. Everyone in the Old World took pains to blend in, not stand out. This whole thing felt fishy.
“Was the lock on the front door damaged?” Jesse asked Aaron next.
“No.”
“Did you find any physical evidence from the suspect?”
“There were several sets of fingerprints, but no hair or fibers that didn’t come from the victim,” Aaron replied, still in that unsettling monotone.
“Who’s in charge of the case?”
“Abramowitz.”
Jesse gave a tiny headshake, mostly to himself. He didn’t know the name. “Is he any good?”
“No, not really.”
The answer came as fast and dispassionate as the others, and for some reason I had to stifle a snort. Jesse looked at me and shrugged, done with questions.
“Okay, Wyatt,” I said in a low voice, but he didn’t break the press yet.
“Did your people find the drops of blood in that corner of the room?” Wyatt asked, pointing toward the doorway where he’d been standing.
“Yes.”
“Whose blood is it?”
“We don’t know. Same blood type as Schmidt, but we don’t know how it could have gotten all the way across the room. We’ll know more when the DNA goes through.”
Wyatt looked at me, which broke the press. “That blood isn’t Schmidt’s,” he said quietly. Aaron was swaying a little, looking unmoored.
“How do you know?” I asked Wyatt.
The vampire went back to the corner and put his nose right over the carpet, taking a long inhale. “It is male,” he reported. “But it’s young—I can smell the hormones.” He sat back on his heels. “I can also smell the magic in it.”
Aaron’s confused face somehow clouded over even more. “Magic?”
I ignored him, focused on Wyatt. “Are you saying—”
He was already nodding. “Witchblood.”
I had no idea what that meant, but there wasn’t much else we were going to learn from the house, so Wyatt took Aaron out to his car to get a new evidence seal and to do his final press on Aaron’s memory. Jesse and I waited in the house so he wouldn’t spot us after he’d been pressed.
“You okay?” I asked Jesse when we were alone. “He was kind of a dick to you.”
Jesse nodded. “Most of the cops feel like that,” he said, peeling off his gloves with great concentration. “They think I’m a traitor, that I sold out for money and fame. Which is only half-right, I guess.”
I stepped closer to him, forcing him to look down at me. His eyes were sad. “I thought you were going to be done with all that,” I reminded him. “The pity party ended ages ago.”
He sighed. “This isn’t me feeling sorry for myself, Scar. I’m just . . .”
“Guilty?”
He scrubbed the palm of his hand through his short hair. “More . . . sad, I guess. I really liked being a cop.” Before I could think of a response to that, he changed the subject. “Male witches are pretty rare, right?”
“Uh, yeah. I need to call Kirsten and find out if the witch who was here tonight was part of her group, but . . .” I made a face. “I think I would remember seeing a teenage male witch at one of their gatherings. As much as I hate to say it, I think this may be connected to the Luparii thing after all. They could have brought the witch with them.”
“Then how was he injured?”
“No idea.”
Wyatt knocked on the door to give the all clear, and Jesse and I went out onto the front step. Wyatt handed Jesse the new seal, and he spent a lot of time putting it up, very focused on getting the lines exactly right. I edged sideways a little so I could see his face in the dim lights from the street. He looked . . . distraught. I was missing something.
“Jesse . . . what else did you see, in your dream?”
He flinched away from me, as though I’d struck him across the face, but didn’t answer. Shit, I’d been right.
Wyatt looked back and forth between us for a moment, and then wandered into the tiny side yard, pretending to be interested in the creepy-ass plants.
“You said they were rifling through your memory,” I said softly to Jesse. “But not where you were or what you saw. I’m sorry. I should have asked.”