Butch blinked. “You took all those pictures first.”
“But I wasn’t careful after that.” Before Butch could respond, V continued, “I was so focused on getting the body out of there and over to Havers’s before dawn came that I just wrecked the goddamn place. It wasn’t until you went there tonight that I realized what I’d done . . . tromping all over the floor, shoving things out of the way, calling in Zypher and Balthazar with their size fourteens.”
“It was an evolving situation. A lot of things were happening.”
“No excuse.” Those eyes looked over. “I made things harder on you with the investigation. I might even have fucked you for finding out who did it. It was inexcusable.”
Thinking back to that storage room, Butch couldn’t deny that there had been substantial displacement of the scene due to the body being removed. But as much as he would have liked to do a proper quarantine and search, they had never discussed what the protocol for responding to a murder would be. Further, there were extenuating circumstances.
“Here’s the thing,” he said, “there are priorities for us that didn’t exist when I was on the human side of things. Getting that body out of there was the prime directive. Could you have disturbed things less? I don’t know. Most of the club had emptied out, from what you told me, but there were still humans on-site. It was not a secure retrieval of the remains by a long shot. You did what you had to. I can deal with the rest.”
“Next time, if there is one, I call you in first. Everybody calls you in first.”
“Good deal.” Butch frowned as he thought about the case. “You know, I got a bad feeling about it all.”
“Why?”
He threw back what was left in his glass and gave the ice a ride, circling, circling, circling. “I don’t know, maybe I’m just out of shape with this kind of work.”
“I spilled my beans. You spill yours.”
Butch smiled a little, thinking that was fair enough. “Well, I do think the killer is one of us. Female vampires are strong. It would take one hell of a human to overpower one.”
“Wait, I thought you said that the female who’d found the body already told you the victim was with a vampire that night.”
“I’m trying not to jump to any conclusions.”
“Smart. Okay, so what if the victim was drugged? A human man could get uphill of that.”
“It’s a possibility. Havers will run a toxicology on her tissue when we get the autopsy done. But even still, that meat hook? It requires a lot of strength to impale that through the base of someone’s skull.”
“Maybe they had help. What if there were two killers?”
“That’s a possibility.” Butch shrugged. “There wasn’t a lot of struggle, I can tell you that. My victim didn’t fight her attacker. So she knew her killer—or was compromised. I looked at her nails and her hands, nothing much there. And there were no defensive wounds on the outsides of her forearms or her knuckles.”
“What if she wanted him and then the sex got out of hand.”
“Could have defo happened that way.”
“You think we’ve got a serial killer?” V murmured as he typed some more and looked at his screen.
“Three victims dead in the same place within the last year and a half. I’d say that raises a red flag. Do you remember what happened with our first or second victims?”
“I know about the second one. We got a call in the following night and I went down there. The body had already been removed by someone, the scene was cold, the phone call to the service made from a burner we couldn’t trace. There was no body, no name on the caller, and no one reported a missing person thereafter.”
“Cold trail.”
“I even wondered if it was a hoax. Now I’m thinking it wasn’t.”
“What about victim number one?”
“It was a human. Found the article in the CCJ about an hour ago. I’ll send the coverage to you when I’m finished here.”
Butch stared at the coffee table without seeing the laptop, the SI magazine, the bag of Doritos he’d brought in along with the scotch from the galley kitchen. If there had been three bodies down there, then yes, they were probably dealing with a serial killer, but again, he was mindful of the lecture he’d given Boone. No jumping to conclusions. Keep everything on the table at this early stage.