the few things the crimes seem to have in common. Not one seems to be premeditated, their doubtful motives aside. It makes the crime scenes . . . messy.”
I relaxed, willing to take that at face value as I leafed through the rest of the reports, seeing ugly pictures of once-living people beside household objects used as weapons: lamp, knife, extension cord. They were I.S. records by the letterhead and the familiar DO NOT COPY stamp. “Messy is the word,” I said, blanching at the destruction of the vampire’s apartment. Dude.
“Messy and spontaneous.” Edden waved off someone who poked their head in, wanting to talk to him, and then he stretched his leg out and shut the door, cutting off the comfortable office chatter. “Whatever was at hand. And viciously fast apart from the vampires. That one there? The vampires? It took fifteen minutes according to a downstairs neighbor. No one called nine-one-one because apparently it’s hard to tell the difference between murder and especially vigorous sex play.”
“That’s what I hear,” I said, feeling myself warm as I shifted the pages about. “Anything else in common?”
“Not much.” He hesitated, and I glanced up. He looked good behind a desk, but I always thought he looked better out in the field, where he wanted to be. “They all have different socioeconomic statuses. Education is all over the map. We’ve got three in the Hollows, one in Cincinnati. Ages range from twenty-five to sixty.” His eyes went to the new-smelling files on his desk. “Most have been in Cincy their entire lives, but not all of them. The only thing they have in common is that they are all in their pajamas.”
He said it like it was a joke, but it rang in me like a Klaxon. “No kidding,” I said, then flipped back to the mug shots, seeing a hint of bedroom lace, a swath of flannel. Bed hair. Lots of bed hair. Frowning, I crossed my knees and paged back and forth for the estimated times of the crimes. Sure enough, though they took place at different hours, the times were consistent with the various species’ sleep schedules. The witch attack was shortly after three a.m., the Were was a little later at dawn. I flipped to the front page. Jack, the guy Edden wanted me to talk to, was predawn. Sighing, I lowered the papers. What was it with humans and elves getting up before dawn?
“Crimes of passion?” I guessed, and Edden frowned to make his mustache bunch up.
“Perhaps not. We haven’t gotten in to talk to Jacqueline for motive yet, but according to Ivy, all the Inderlanders involved seem to have lost it over something that happened in their past. The motives are old. So old they don’t have any merit.”
He stood seeing my quizzical face, coming around to take the wad of I.S. reports from me. “The witch couple, here?” he said, handing it back with the pertinent report on top. “The one who killed her boyfriend with a suffocation charm? She said she got mad about him dragging her out of drug addiction three years ago.”
“That’s weird.” I looked down at a shot of a clearly dead twenty-something witch, his brown eyes bulging and nail gouges at his neck. Self-inflected, according to the report. “Maybe she started up again, and he was giving her grief?”
“Toxicology says no.” Standing at my shoulder, Edden looked at the photo, his eyes tired. “The woman is clean. She’s devastated for having killed him, but clean. She says she was mad at him, but she isn’t mad now. Says she doesn’t understand what happened.”
“That makes two of us.”
“Same thing with the vampires.” Edden held his hand out, wiggling his fingers, but I flipped the pages myself, stopping at the photo of a torn-up open-floor-plan apartment done in tasteful grays and blues. There was no body under the dent in the wall covered in photos of smiling people, but there was a chalk outline. The woman had undoubtedly been whisked away to a light-tight morgue where she could turn in safety. From the mess, it hadn’t been a fast or easy death. “Man killed woman because she had a shadow. Jealous rage,” Edden said shortly.
“And . . . ,” I prompted, not seeing why this was considered weird. Wrong and stupid, but not weird in the jealous lives of living vampires. Shadows were generally entrapped humans who followed the vampire who’d bitten them like a puppy, jonesing for their next bite, hooked