Brent paused the images; I think any excuse at this point to take a breather sounded good to all of us. “We thought they were just changing clothes on her to make it look like time was passing, too, at first,” Brent said, “but notice the calendar on the wall.”
“It’s not just there to make it look more homey?” Zerbrowski asked. He made little air quotes around homey.
“Nobody puts a calendar in their bedroom unless it’s the only space they have to live in,” I said.
“Exactly,” Manning said. “Did you notice?”
I thought for a second. “The month changed.”
“Zombies rot, always; that’s the rule that Anita taught me. It can’t be a month later.”
She nodded. “It’s not proof that much time actually passed, but we think it may be their way of showing clients that they’ve done something unique.”
“Her soul is back in her eyes, that wasn’t unique enough?” I asked, and my voice didn’t sound neutral the way I tried to sound this early in an investigation. I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to pull off neutral with this case; sometimes you can’t.
“You saw it,” Manning said.
“We both saw it,” Zerbrowski said.
“Would you have said her soul was back in her eyes, Sergeant?”
“I’m not that poetic.”
Manning looked at me. “I don’t think Marshal Blake was being poetic.”
Zerbrowski looked from her to me. “I think I’m missing something.”
“Don’t feel bad,” Brent said. “It took us weeks to figure it out.”
“Figure out what?” he asked.
“Were you being poetic, Marshal Blake?” Manning asked.
“No.”
“Enlighten us,” she said, and there was something in the way she said it that I didn’t like. It was just an undercurrent, but if I had to bet, I think something I’d said, or done, while we watched the films had made her suspicious of me. I wondered, if it hadn’t been a male voice ordering the zombie around, would they have looked at me as a suspect from the beginning? I hoped not, but a lot of people still saw my psychic ability as evil. Hell, the Catholic Church had excommunicated us all unless we gave up raising the dead, because only Jesus was allowed to do that. Biblical scholars had pointed out that four of his disciples had done it, too, but the Pope, at the time, had found comparing zombie-raising pagans to the disciples of Jesus Christ less than amusing.
“Her soul, her personality, whatever you want to call it, seems to be in the body, except you can’t raise a zombie from the grave if the soul is still in residence,” I said.
“So how do you explain it?” she asked.
“She was just a walking corpse in the first film. Her eyes were empty, she was an it, but between that and the first sex tape, that changed.”
“How?” Manning asked.
“You’ve got witches and psychics on the payroll at the FBI now. You even have at least one animator. What’d they come up with?”
“Nothing,” she said.
Brent added, “They all saw what you see, that she was in there somehow, but no one had a clue how it was accomplished.”
“Do you know how it was done?” Manning asked.
I nodded. “I’ve seen it done once.”
“Give us a name and we may have our guy,” Brent said, all eager for a clue.
“It was a woman, and she’s dead.” I added, “I believe she’s dead.”